Category Archives: being seen

Glitter, expectations, potential, and success.

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Well this is going to be a bragging asshole kind of post. I already feel guilty. But I’m going to do it anyway. Why? Because people are complicated and shouldn’t be treated like single issue focused creatures.

I’ve been touching base with some of my boys. This is always a little bit of a weird experience for me. It’s not that they sit around and wait for me but… they leave a space in their life for me. In case I should ever choose to step back in. That is daunting, flattering, and exciting. It means I should consider how to manage the situation so I don’t hurt anyone in a way they don’t need to be hurt.

The goal here isn’t to break as many hearts as possible. The goal is to make as much love as possible so that everyone can be happier, right? But happiness is one of those tricky things. Sometimes it is zero sum game and sometimes more happiness multiplies the happiness. It depends on who you are dealing with, what makes them happy, and what kind of happiness they aspire to in the future.

I feel that if my hoohaw is glittery enough that people are trailing me for decades… I can be gracious. That’s an honor, yo.

But it’s kind of a weird honor. It’s an honor that for at least a few months in a row I stopped wanting. (May I say how tactful my boys were. They stepped right back and didn’t re-present until I started sounding feisty again.)

My boys were respectful about the difference between “no” and “not now”. Thanks!

That’s… well done. Fabulously done. I’m impressed. No one pissed me off with their tenacity. They just kinda… hung out till I was ready to interact with them how they like to be interacted with again.

Oh. Well shit.

I’m feeling feisty. I don’t know what this is going to mean. I’m not feeling slutty, it’s different. Noah really does a good job of fucking me how I want to be fucked so I don’t feel like I’m missing much in the sex department. But I miss bdsm. I miss being that person. I love watching folks eyes light up when they see me because they know I’m about to send a chemical storm of awesome through their body.

There isn’t much else like it.

I think it is funny how the boys stick around and the girls swim on. I don’t have a single girl waiting around on me. (Actually one spoke up!) Even though I like playing with girls more than I like playing with boys.

Want to know one of the sad facts about the patriarchy? Men and boys are conditioned to get by on the scraps they receive from people every great while. They are good at self-sustaining in between bursts of what I feel like giving them. Women are more complex and either give up on sex and decide they aren’t worthy so they don’t stay in the queue or they move on and slam the door behind them.

That’s my slutty experience.

I don’t think my boys should wait around. I think it just happens. I think it is more that they don’t slam the door behind them than that they are waiting. If that makes sense. It’s not that they are aggressively chasing me at this point. (I’d be fucking rude if they were.) But they… let me know that if I ever change my mind…. here they still are.

I appreciate you so much there aren’t enough words.

You definitely do something for my self esteem that other parts of my life don’t impact. *puff chest*

Very very hot people are thoroughly convinced that they deeply want something I have to offer. Yeah. I feel cocky about that.

Noah and I were talking about the concept of potential the other day. He said that he’s pretty sure he’s used most of the potential he was born with in this life (I must say he’s done well by it) but he isn’t sure about me. He can’t tell at all where the limits of my potential are he just knows I’m not there yet.

That’s…

Oh. Yeah. This is why I like being married to you so much. It’s not just that you waited for me and came back. It’s not just that you fuck like my favorite porn star. It’s not just that you work and work to help make my dreams a reality…

It’s that you genuinely believe my potential is so great that you are going to work your whole life and feel like you are doing the right thing to help propel me forward.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

That’s intense, yo.

I am not just a slave put here to serve the interests of narcissists. heh.

To be fair that narcissist gave me the best possible start to my adult life. He gave me safety, boundaries, and the requirement of developing limits. I’m grateful.

I’m also ready to be something different.

That is feeling quite complex.

My friend asked if were going to be monogamish going forward. I feel guilty because I was the one who closed the relationship because I didn’t think we could recover from more mistakes any time soon. Now I’m the one most antsy. Typical.

I don’t know what we are going to do. I look forward to figuring it out with Noah though. He’s the best person I’ve ever met to talk to.

I have a lot of things on my to do list. They will all get done. I have a lot of things on my bucket list. Most of them will get done. Mostly because I get to do all this planning with Noah and between the two of us… we are quite remarkable.

Noah tells me that the secret to happiness is low expectations. It’s true and not true. On one hand, I expect Noah to be obnoxious and I used to think of him as lazy. (I’ve stopped.) On the other hand I kind of expect him to jump through flaming hoops… and he does.

He has risen to the level of father I demanded of him. I am constantly blown away by what a good father he is. He decided he was doing that shit and he does it like whoa. He’s serious. We made these people. We want to pay as much attention to them as we can possibly stand for their childhood. We pick the high intensity version of parenting. Can we have more time with them? Do we really need to sleep? Can we spend more time with them?

They will grow up so soon. They will go off. They will have to do their best with the lessons we have taught them. It is such a short time.

I don’t want to waste very many minutes.

If I could be lying prone snuggling up with my babies or I could be doing something “productive”? Guess what… productive will be here later. My babies will move on. I pick my babies.

I pick my babies.

I pick my babies.

So what the hell is up with my boys?

I’m a complex woman. I might be a gentle earth mama but I’m also a nasty predatory sadist. These days I know how to hunt for prey that really really really wants to be caught so I don’t feel bad.

Dude. They’ve been fucking waiting for almost two decades. I’m not hurting them by playing games that we both like. I’m having fun. I’m having a kind of fun other people don’t want to have and that’s ok. They don’t need to do it.

As for me, I’m going to beat a nice cock for hours and hours. I’m going to kick it until I have no more kinetic energy left in my body. When I’m done I’m going to snuggle my wonderful friend and feed him snacks and thank him for being so wonderful as to share this experience with me.

I appreciate you. I’m glad we can have this time together doing something we both like so much.

It can’t happen until I seriously catch up on sleep. I feel like a zombie.

Why do we pursue health? What does health mean?

Fuck if I know.

I don’t know what I expect from the future other than I will find adventures. Know what I know about adventures? Sometimes they are a much better story after the fact than a good experience while it is happening.

I have felt a lot of cognitive dissonance lately because people are feeling free to tell me that they had low expectations and high expectations and I’m exceeding them. All of them. I’m just… more than anyone thought I could be.

I don’t know what that means exactly. Doesn’t everyone have this potential? You can write your own story. All you need to do is take every opportunity to act upon the world, right?

I want to learn how to be a tactful ensemble character. I’m not going to stop being a main character. But I don’t want to treat people like they are disposable. Some chapters are short and we part ways and I’ll never talk to you again; that’s ok.

But some chapters pause then resume. Some characters come back in over and over again.

I see you. I am grateful.

Too much, again. Damnit.

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Stuff is creeping in. Today: having lunch with a friend then we are getting tattoos. Tonight I’m having dinner with a lovely friend. Tomorrow is all the massage. The kids also have stuff to get to.

It isn’t that what I’m doing is hard, it is that I’m having to switch gears on what I’m thinking about. I was thinking about that process lately: transitioning. I’ve been staring at the kids all week and thinking about the idea of transitioning from one activity to another and how do we do it?

A friend asked me how I feel about classes that my kids sign up for. Do I insist on attendance? Err… it doesn’t come up much? My kids aren’t very scheduled. Our classes are exciting treats that we are very happy to learn about. There is no dragging. It isn’t hard for us to get out of the house (mostly) because I start getting ready about three hours before we need to leave.

Most days we sit down at breakfast and talk about the structure of the day. What are we doing? Where are we going? I give the kids an idea of what to expect and when I’ll start prompting them to get ready.

Very rarely I run into the room and say, “Oh shoot! I didn’t look at a clock and I forgot _____ and we need to walk out the door RIGHT NOW!!!”

I am shocked that when I do this the kids usually jump up in the air and start rushing to get ready like someone is chasing them with a hot poker. They have bought in to “this is our life and we are obligated to show up when we say we will”.

I talk a lot about respecting teachers because they choose to share what they know with people who want to learn. That’s a gift and an honor. You must respect the efforts of teachers.

Kinda funny given how anti school I am, right? I’m not anti teachers. I’m anti-Industrial-Era-conformity-brainwashing.

That’s not the same thing as learning or education or teachers. In fact I have incredible respect for the process of learning.

Not that every school (public or otherwise) works the same way. I know. But it’s a crapshoot year by year. In “school” you don’t get to pick your teachers, mostly. In life you do. College is a weird hybrid of “school” and life because you have some choice but not that much. You pick your place of education more. (Not that most people research the teaching staff much before picking a university.) You get to drop classes and take a different teacher if you don’t like an approach… sometimes.

I have multiple bad grades (D or F) on my record because of personality conflicts with teachers. Does that mean I know nothing about those subjects? Nope. It means that bitch didn’t like me.

That happens.

School is about measuring how you jump through the random hoops that someone decides to set for you. You think it is even and fair how those hoops are divvied out? Ha. Ha. Ha.

Standardized tests are flat out abusive to most minority populations. Why? Because they say, “Hey, how quickly can you identify all this random shit from White American Culture? Not fast? Then you’re stupid.”

That’s abusive.

And school in America in the year 2016 is about, “How fast can you regurgitate facts about this culture to prove you are ‘smart’.”

Yes there are exceptions. Yes there are good teachers in public schools and there are good private schools.

Are those private schools available to people who are very poor? No? Then school in America is about regurgitating facts. I don’t care that your kid might be getting away with having a good experience. The majority of American children are not.

How do I know this? Why am I so god damn confident of what I know? Because I went to 25 schools. Then 7 universities. Then I substituted in about 8 schools. Then I taught in 4 schools.

It’s not a huge sample size. But it’s big enough to let me see a diversity most people get to pretend doesn’t exist. I went to schools in rural areas, in neighborhoods of a predominate ethnic identity other than white, in rich schools, in poor schools, and many levels in between. I’ve seen Silicon Valley, Compton, and rural Oklahoma.

I can’t speak to the east coast from personal experience. But I read a lot of teachers. I’m pretty sure I’m right from coast to coast. Teachers are talking about the problems in the system. All you have to do is go look a little bit and you’ll find criticism. You’ll never run out of it to read.

I don’t think my way is right or mass actionable. I don’t think the solution to our broken schooling system is everyone opting out to home school. But I don’t know how to force the solutions that are necessary. I don’t know how to force a non-abusive mechanism on top of an abusive system and I just can’t be part of that abusive system any more. Not as a student and not as a parent.

Could I be a teacher in that system? Sure. Why? Because I’m subversive as fuck and I think the kids who are there need people like me whenever possible. Will I sacrifice everything in my life on the altar of helping other peoples kids?

No. I made these two people. I’m responsible for them.

Yesterday I cracked. I stopped asking the kids to help and I sent them outside to play. They had a glorious day and I got the house like 75% of the way to clean. Yes, I know people believe that I clean frantically full time and my house is always spotless so it isn’t that much work (or something). Well, actually…. (I find myself using that more often because it is now a banned phrase in many places. I try to only do it when I’m being a snot and refuting ideas about myself that annoy me.) I don’t clean that much. My house turns into a pit just like everyone else’s house. But I host big parties pretty frequently and I usually spend about a week cleaning before hand. So people think my house is always clean.

It’s a ruse.

I can usually flight of the bumblebee and feel presentable for dinner guests. And my kids have to pick up their toys before they get screens so our house doesn’t get that bad. Only mostly they clean by shoving whichever behind whatever and into wherever. So every so often we have to dump ever drawer, every shelf, every everything in order to find things. Because seriously after a while we can’t find anything and then everyone expects me to be a fucking homing beacon and they ask me 9,032 times a day where “x” is.

I can’t.

They ask me to buy them new shoes because they can’t find any to wear. I clean their room and find four pairs. That kinda thing.

So a few times a year we face overwhelming chaos. For the love of toast I don’t know how families with two working parents ever clean at all. When it gets bad (like me being gone two weekends in a row so things kinda pile up extra hard, and we are remodeling, and school level transitioning) it will take a solid 8-10 days of me cleaning for 4-10 hours/day.

(There’s always a day in the middle where I clean for four hours then collapse in a heap and cry for a while.)

This cleaning is extra epic because Youngest child has to be entirely moved out of that bedroom indefinitely for the remodel. They are currently replacing the wall/window and that room is not sealed to the out doors. (They have built the new bathroom walls/front wall in front of it, but it’s not all done and everything.) Lots of construction debris in there. Kiddo can’t use that room.

So they are sharing again for a bit. Which was ridiculous extra cleaning and sorting. Frankly I think they were god damn awesome.

At one point Eldest Child started crying and said, “I’m just not good at cleaning. I’m not smart at this and I never will be.”

I laughed and laughed and laughed. She looked at me and said, “WHAT?!”

“You act like I fell out of my mother’s womb being able to clean. I couldn’t do it when I was seven. Frankly I think you have more skill than I had at that age.”

She blinked for a bit, dried her eyes, and got up and made tremendous progress all in a big burst. At the end she grinned at me and said, “Ok I am getting better.”

Cocky little thing. Yes, you are. Every day. Every year. You are getting better.

So I think about these things because transitioning eats into progress. The more times I have to transition in a day the less progress I make on all tasks. This is a well documented phenomena. You can spend four years taking a Spanish class, or four months of immersion. And after the immersion experience you will be far more fluent.

Some guys I know were bitching at me that I should really stop what I’m doing with my life and learn all about the influential music from 1968.

I told them I don’t have time and they demanded that I justify what is more important than that. I rattled off what I’m doing with my life. They kinda blinked at me and said, “Ok maybe you don’t have time.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Everyone has different stuff going on in their lives. Everyone has a different comfort level of transitions. I don’t need to judge what other people need in order to feel comfortable. That internal Holy Fucking Shit No reaction needs to be turned off. Ain’t nobody trying to tell me that I need to pick it up. Not really.

My inside voice is changing. I do hear you.

Chill. The. Fuck. Out.

Why do I talk to myself? Because over time I am changing how I react to different stimuli. It was said that a lot of what is interesting about me now is that I do fewer global freak outs. When something is upsetting to me I don’t scream about everyone and everything. I can say exactly what I’m upset about and why and I can usually trace it down to the root. That’s letting me pull the weeds. I can tell which tendrils are a problem.

It’s ok that I failed in the school environment. I mean, I was usually an A/B student (except for personality conflicts) and I’m still a failure in the school environment. It isn’t that I’m unintelligent. But I cannot conform in the ways required to go period to period learning in the teeny chunks that can hopefully be absorbed by a large enough percentage of people to not be a complete waste of time to everyone. Woo.

Do you know why I was a good teacher? Because I met before school, during breaks, after school, and on Saturdays with students who could not understand what I was teaching and I helped them catch up on foundational information they missed along the way.

I can’t give that much of myself to people outside my family right now. My kids need that time from me. Why? Because we have some fucked up brain chemistry and DNA from generations of trauma. We need to do what we are doing right now.

We are learning how to adapt to life. We are learning how to learn. We are learning shit loads of stuff that we will be able to use later. We are planning. We are growing.

And we are doing it slowly. We are doing it by concentrating on one thing at a time for a few weeks.

That way we can spend many hours a day on one task and make substantial progress at it instead of spending 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there.

It is hard. It is physically and mentally and emotionally taxing. But I enjoy it. I feel rewarded. I feel like my reward is the conversation I get to have around the table every meal. My kids fucking think.

I know so much intense analysis of My Little Pony characters that it is ridiculous because I don’t think I’ve ever watched an episode. I know their back stories, motivations, and things that are being foreshadowed. Yeah. My kid told me, “They are seriously foreshadowing something about her in this episode….” Then later I heard, “In this episode they broke the fourth wall to…”

I asked her if she knows what breaking the fourth wall actually means. Nope. So I explained. In great detail. With lots of examples. Afterwards she started rattling off examples.

Yup. Like that.

I treat my children like if they don’t know something yet it is because I have not yet done a good enough job of talking about it. So I’d better get on that.

I really like my life.

I like feeling responsible. Resiliency experts say that people are most likely to be successful if they internalize that they must be responsible. In other words: we must find a way or make a way. So we do.

I feel that way about anti-racist stuff. Incest research. Home schooling. Teaching my kids how to take care of their shit.

I believe I must make this work. Period. So I will.

What does that actually fucking mean? It means that I picked this life. Who the fuck knows why. So I’m going to live it to the absolute fullest. With great privilege comes great responsibility. I’m one of the luckiest mother fuckers born in the history of all time.

How did that happen?

Even with all the trauma. So fucking what. Every level of person experiences trauma. That’s universal. Not every being experiences trauma (lucky bastards) but every level of human experience has trauma.

What traumatizes one person is standard, normal, and appropriate to someone else. So check your fucking judgment, wench. (talking to myself…)

I have an idea for the tattoo. I’m not going to write it out in advance. But I’m going to have a wonderful time talking to my artist today. He’s so wonderful.

And I’m having lunch with a friend first. Then dinner with a different friend.

I don’t in any way want to complain about the fullness of my life. I am blessed. I am loved. People seek out my company on my terms. Because they consider the effort to be worth what they get in return.

I can’t judge that. I need to just say thank you.

I’m trying to slow down. Frankly the remodel is driving me batty. They are banging all day long. So every second all day long I have to process hitting sounds and decide they aren’t a threat.

That wears me out.

But I have to be home. For Reasons.

So I’m doing what I can to destress in the house. My anxiety is spiking like a motherfucker. But! I know it is temporary so I can have something I badly want and I’ll get to have it as long as I live here. Sounds worth putting up with.

But it hurts my body. It’ll end soon.

Every time I transition from thinking, “Is that the door?” back to whatever I’m doing… it takes a penalty spoon.

So I’m thinking about transitions like fuck right now. How many activities can I manage to get done in a day? How much work? How many different kinds of tasks? I think it is funny how different stages of cleaning feel different to me. I can’t declutter a room, organize it, then remove filth all in a go. I just can’t transition like that. I have to declutter the house. Then organize it. Then clean. I can’t go back and forth because I experience distress physically and psychiatrically.

Transitions are that hard for me. I will fall to the floor and sob and not be able to do whatever it is you want of me because I just can’t.

That’s something that has been a pattern in my life for a very long time and I’m just kind of recognizing what that means in my head. Oh. Flooding. Oh. That’s…

Oh.

Yeah. That.

I like intense connections with a lot of fucking bandwidth. So when I need to spread that bandwidth out between 37 different distractions instead of 2-3…

I hurt.

It isn’t anyone else’s fault. But I’m trying to figure out what managing that means. I need this to get better. I need to stop flooding when I walk near someone else’s life because I feel like I should try to conform and I can’t I can’t I can’t.

No one god damn asked you to. Chill. The. Fuck. Out.

I’m trying.

It’s funny to stop and think, “This is actually a huge improvement!”

Good grief.

There are a high number of specific high intensity things I want to get done in this life. I won’t get them done in 15 minutes of prep at a time. That’s ok. I don’t need to schedule my life how other people do. It is working for them. Stop projecting.

We all want different things. Health means something different to every person.

I’m trying to figure out what it means to me. This is proving to be more complicated than expected. Not sure if that is because I was naive to start with or what. Anything is possible.

I’m making a lot of progress with my pain stuff. (The overall refraining from typing is helping. Hey–it’s Friday. I kinda took a few days off… I am trying to moderate…)

I’m making progress on pain stuff. My bowels are… well… I’m told this is progress? I don’t fucking know. But it is weirder than hell. I mostly stopped with the pills for a few days (because obviously my body was freaking out) on the doctors recommendation and the freak out ended right away. This is supposedly a sign that things are working right on schedule. I will resume sloughing the parasites from my liver later today. Oh joy. But! I’m seeing… uhm… something fucking weird that I’m told is results?

Pooooooooooooooooooooop.

We talk about poop while eating all the time.

Muahahahaha

My kids are very comfortable saying, “I’m going to eat lots of vegetables because your body sucks.”

If you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning. Do one or the other and then do that motherfucker.

I guess?

Yesterday I screwed up. I put in a load of laundry and I didn’t even think about what I was washing. A new dress up clothes thing was put in the basket. It had never been washed. It was bright fucking red. So all the martial arts uniforms were very pink.

Oooooops. Shit. Like rose colored pink. Dark rose. I was all, “NOOOOOOOO!”

Then I thought about my mama and I breathed a prayer of thanks. “Hey kids? Want to learn how to fix a mistake?” I used oxygen brightener and bleach and I boiled it on the stove top and those fuckers are white as snow once again.

Because my mama taught me what to do.

That’s a good memory. Thank you, mama.

Thank you for teaching me how to do my laundry on the stove because that was what we had and you were going to make sure I had the skills to be presentable no matter what happened to me or how bad my life was. You tried. Thank you.

During this process my friend was over and she asked if I wanted her to do the poking/stirring over the fire. I didn’t want her to. I felt entirely Zen in that moment. I am where I want to be doing what I want to do. I’m showing my kids how I fix a mistake. It takes time and effort. But it’ll be ok.

It was one of the most intensely blissful moments I’ve experienced in a while. That’s flow.

If I cared very much about getting out of my house and not being “stuck” with these experiences as the woman… I wouldn’t get to have that. I’m glad I get to have that. I’m glad I get to see the value in my mother.

I miss you, mama.

I miss all the friends I’m not reaching out to because I’m overwhelmed. I’ll come back. I’ll have spoons some day.

In March we have social stuff planned on the first two days. Then… uhm… I don’t know about the Easter party. Wonder how my bathroom will be? Err… I’ll let people know two weeks before?

I think that I need to not schedule anything else in March. Which is intimidating. I’m not resting. I’m working and socializing because I’m so desperate to catch up on the work. I need to rest and I won’t stop working so socializing needs to be back burnered for a few weeks. Just Do Eeeet.

What work do I feel so pressed to do? Well… we are transitioning from preschool to elementary school. Which is a fuck ton of work for me. (I don’t know how you folks who home school with kids in preschool, elementary, middle, & high school do it. How do you find space?! )

The thing I miss the most about teaching in a school is the prep time plus the right to control what everyone was going to be learning. This is much harder. I have to prepare on the fly for a range of topics. It’s brutal some days in terms of cognitive load. It is fucking hard breaking down every little thing into schemas and concepts and repeatable skill training.

This is why other sane people outsource this shit. But we have some genetic stuff to consider that will make us always on the edge of the bell curve. I’m glad the training exists for people in the center of the bell curve. Yay you!

Hi, I’m Krissy. I’m an outlier.

Name the metric.

I just uhm…. like to be difficult?

IT ISN’T PERSONAL, OK!?!

I should stop now. If I get up and start moving now I’ll have all my morning prep done before Noah finishes breakfast and I will be able to eat at the same time as them instead of sitting down as they finish eating. I’m a pain in the ass to take care of. I struggle to think the effort is really merited.

Know something that I find wacky? Youngest child just fucking loves to stand there and hand me pill after pill after pill. Kid says, “You have to fix the problems. You have to get your poop better so you can digest food. I want you to die when you are very very very old. So here.” It varies somewhat, but this entire experience is just…

validating as fuck.

I’m trying to figure out what I need. My issues are complicated, layered, and difficult to solve. I know you are doing what you need to do to solve your issues and it doesn’t look much like what I’m doing.

I need to figure out how to not feel so fucking bad about that. It’s ok that I need stuff other people don’t need. That doesn’t mean I’m bad. That doesn’t mean I should die so I stop stealing resources from more worthy people. It has to be ok that I need what I need.

It isn’t fair that I have the money to pay for it and other people don’t. There is no fair. There is no deserve. There is no way to have things come out even.

I had to believe there is no deserve when it was really bad. I have to believe it about the good stuff too. Or …. or I just can’t. I can’t do this. I can’t get fucking pompous and shitty and “Oh I have a good life because I deserve it. Because I worked harder than other people.”

Gag. Cough. Puke. Bullshit.

No. I really didn’t work harder than other people. Ok, I worked harder than some people. But not harder than everyone. Some people worked ten times as hard as me. They didn’t get where I am.

It’s not because I’m getting what I deserve.

Nothing is fair.

4,050 words. I should stop anyway. Oh my poor wrists. But I feel better. I feel like I’m finding the words to the parts I need to talk about without talking about what I don’t need to talk about.

That feels better.

How do I get to be me without hurting other people?

That’s the journey.

Totally flooded.

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I haz big feelings. My stomach hurts. But I feel like I worked out this awful thing that has been in my neck/shoulder for years. I feel like I did a major trauma release in this class. That’s kinda intense. Exposure therapy for the win.

This is what exposure therapy means. The attackers are safe guys in suits who maintain their distance so they can maintain their aura of scary. But they are monitored by women the whole time. It isn’t some guy deciding to do something to a woman when he feels like it and she should have to react right. That’s not exposure therapy. Exposure therapy means a female coach kneeling with her face next to your face whispering, “Remember to breathe. Stop. Wait for the moment. You can do this.”

Stop calling real life abuse exposure therapy. It isn’t. Ok, digression over.

My second experience at Impact was fairly different from the first. I didn’t have a friend in the class. It felt like the group warmed up slower but then made more genuine connections once we did warm up. Everyone started off tentative and not too chatty but by the final day we were pretty friendly. That felt nice.

I took a risk the morning of the third day. I said that the cheering wasn’t making it through to me during my fights and I really needed the line to get louder and more encouraging because it’s scary to fight in quiet. I feel alone. I have to say, those women came through once I made a specific request. They did great.

I didn’t ask for more than one extended fight this time. I literally just… couldn’t. By the time I got through the one extended fight my body was saying, “Let the men make them easy from here on out.”

The guys… they have to work ridiculously hard to do an extended fight with the people who really want blood. They do extended fights to teach women that even when you feel exhausted (this is as close as they will get to the exhaustion of a fight where you will be dealing with someone hitting you) and tired and worn out you can still defend yourself. I think I have a better understanding of fighting from a place of exhaustion from the get go, so I didn’t need the exercise this weekend.

I chose to leave a few spoons in my drawer. Because today I seriously need to pay attention to the kids and if I had left it all out on the mat I would spend today in bed crying. I just couldn’t. This wasn’t a real fight to the death so it would have been inappropriate to wear myself out that hard so I couldn’t hang with the kids.

I pay attention to these things.

Topic switch. Back to hitting.

Yes, I think (upon further reflection) what I am doing with Noah unconsciously probably would be better termed a tap or a light smack… but that is still putting my hands on someone else’s body in a way I’m not paying attention to. In a way that he chooses to describe as being hit. Because he gets that choice. I need to stop it.

Just like people don’t get to tell me that when the kid kicked me in the throat it wasn’t assault. Yes, actually it was an assault. I’m not going to prosecute because I don’t think the kid had malicious intent. But it was an assault.

It is possible to hit and not be causing (permanent) damage. Not be hurting people. Still be a problem. Still need to stop.

I need to have so much fucking control over my body that I do not put my hands on people at all unless I am doing it in a way that I am highly conscious and in control of exactly what I’m doing. I can’t be muddy. I can’t be like “Close enough is good enough.” Not with what I want to do with my life.

So maybe I’m over reacting and maybe I’m understanding how much work I have left on this problem. I need to stop hitting people. Entirely. 100000% unless someone is directly threatening my physical safety.

I know I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to live in gray areas but this is a black and white thing. I’ve done too much hitting in my life. I need to get this under control.

I mean, not that I’m going to cancel that nice date with my friend. I’m going to do everything in my power to get to the point where I only hit people (even lightly) when they say, “Pretty please”. Or they start a fight.

I spent a lot of this class thinking about escalation. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I escalate.

I know it’s all victim blamey and shit, but yeah a lot of the fights, a lot of the rapes kinda happened because I had no ability to deescalate. It hurts seeing that so plainly over time. I am not good at managing peoples emotions in a deescalating way. I’m good at cranking the volume up. I stimulate feelings I don’t settle them. This is a problem.

I think about things like the neighbor who has been sexually harassing me. Did I encourage him? I don’t think so. 90%+ of the time I talk to him my kids are standing right there and I don’t encourage displays of sexuality in front of my children. So I’m inclined to believe this is his desperate fantasy that he isn’t dead yet and he’s still sexually interesting instead of this being about me. But do I deescalate properly when he brings stuff up? Mostly I call the kids and keep walking when he gets rude. What else should I be doing?

Well I think kicking the crap out of him then telling him I cannot be in control if a man grabs me may have been effective. He’s keeping more physical distance these days.

But is he going to creep again? My guess is yes. Because creepers gonna creep. Does it make it all my fault if it happens again because I’m stupid enough to talk to him?

You know what? I get to walk around my god damn neighborhood without having to physically fight off unwanted sexual advances. That’s fucking ridiculous. No this isn’t my fault and I should not have to avoid walking down my own god damn street to avoid being sexually harassed. That’s not reasonable. If he starts shit I’m not the one escalating. He is. I’m just not going to fucking be passive. I’m very friendly and non-threatening with him. I have no desire to hurt him. I’m just not going to let him do shit to me I don’t want to have done.

That has to be ok. No matter how old he is. No matter how much I like him. No matter if I know any man ever again.

I get to say yes to everything that happens to my body. Or I get to fucking hurt you. That’s the deal.

I’m getting closer to the point where I feel I could actually do it in a fight.

It was hard having Noah there. I asked him if he thought I could stop him if he tried to rape me at this point. He isn’t convinced.

I need to take more classes. It is 100% my goal to be able to so deeply scare men that they do not believe they could successfully do that again.

Not because I want to hurt men. Because I’m not going to be raped again. I’m done. The passive has been raped right the fuck out of me. I’ve taken all I can take.

It is quite literally my goal to die before letting someone rape me again. I want to fight to the point where someone has the choice to kill me or leave me alone.

I’m done.

Something broke and it can’t be fixed.

To be fair, Noah didn’t see my extended fight. He saw the easy peasy fights the instructors give you to blow off steam so you walk out of the room feeling strong so you don’t leave feeling like you should walk in front of a bus. They plan this shit. They know the roller coaster they put people on. Noah didn’t see quite how effective I am at kicking peoples skulls in. I practice from a variety of angles. I’m semi-worried that I will actually kill someone because I’m going to be kicking with such incredible force and anger. I may well shove someones face into their brain.

I won’t lose sleep over that. Ok, yes I will. I will be convinced I’m a monster who should be killed. Maybe I’ll go to jail and think that’s fair.

But I won’t be god damn raped that day.

I feel dangerous and horrible. But yes I am prepared to use deadly force to prevent someone from raping me again.

I have to believe I deserve that or I need to die today because I cannot endure another rape. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I’m done. I have to believe I am allowed to kill someone to stop them if necessary. I know that in an actual fight I will have to use the minimum amount of force necessary to stop a fight. I know that. The chances I will get to a fight that results in death are incredibly freakishly low. Only I’m going to pursue a career that will make people hate me with the power of the sun.

So maybe my chances aren’t vanishingly small. Maybe they just aren’t that high?

I don’t know that I am yet at a point where I am capable of holding the adrenaline in and just doing the necessary hurting.

During one of my fights the suited instructor literally ran out of the room to get away from me because I was chasing too much.

I mean, I didn’t chase him off the mat. But I did take steps in his direction. I hear that the expression on my face was uhhhhh… terrifying.

I don’t know if that is a regular schtick of theirs to try and break the tension because it’s funny. Or if he felt like that is actually how an attacker would respond because holy shit.

I don’t know.

You never know.

They call the rape prevention moves “reversals”. Because you are reversing the power. Those are the ones where you have to stay still on the floor and use physics and it’s scary and complicated and fairly precise. I find them horrifyingly triggering.

It’s really hard to say, “I tried that and what happened was…” I failed. That’s what happened. I failed when I tried to do that. I didn’t prevent a rape that day.

Ahhh. I tried to move long before I felt weight. There was no physics to help me. Fuck everything. Well, specifically he fucked me. After slamming my head into the ground so hard I saw stars. I stopped fighting.

I don’t know if it would be different today. I don’t actually feel confident. That was just a fucking class. I was chanting to myself the whole time, “There is no chance this man would actually rape you. There are witnesses. He’s wearing very difficult clothing. This isn’t real.” Because I wanted to run screaming I was so fucking freaked out. But… that means it isn’t that real in my body.

Would I be able to access this when I’m scared? I’ve worked so hard for so many years to break the freeze response. I’m tired of going numb. But it is a genuine survival skill. I have worked hard to make it less likely I will survive.

I’m ready to die or assert myself. One or the other. But I do not yet know for sure that I’d win.

It is hard believing that I would kill to defend myself and that is part of why I am a disgusting person. I don’t know that I really believe I have the right. I am bad. I want to hurt people.

Not really. I’m just god damn done letting them hurt me.

That’s not true either. I do want to hurt people. I want to hurt people who like being hurt because it released kinetic energy from my body and it allows me to be more calm and gentle when necessary and appropriate.

Hitting is all of these things. It is tapping Noah when I shouldn’t. Even though it doesn’t hurt I’m touching someone without consent in a way that can be described as hitting. My friend who is inviting me to a lovely session of testicle kicking, that’s hitting too. It is completely consensual. He’s going to have a good time, I’m going to have a good time–it’s going to be fun! And being willing to beat someone unconscious for trying to rape me.

It’s all hitting. It is all violence. But do they mean the same things? Should they be treated the same way legally? Should they be treated like trauma because “hitting”?

Everyone gets to decide for themselves what is traumatizing. I’ve done bdsm scenes that were WAY more intense/painful/fucking out there than my rapes. My rapes traumatized me. My rapes were an action that I did not consent to happening to my body in a way that proved to me that I do not have the right to have agency over myself or my life. My bdsm scenes were done with friends and they were fun. Even if they were painful and scary. I knew what I was signing on for. I did it on purpose. I did it with full force and vigor and choice.

That makes all the difference.

I don’t feel traumatized by the throat kick. I feel like I learned something about boundaries.

If you fuck up and assault someone… that isn’t the end of the world. How you respond afterwards is what matters.

If you fuck up and assault someone on purpose… that’s different.

I genuinely believe there are accidental assaults all the time. Just like there is involuntary manslaughter.

Ok, I have one specific complaint about the class this time: I really didn’t appreciate the “boogeyman homeless guy” thing. That fucking pissed me off. The vast majority of assaults are someone you know. Leave the fucking homeless guys alone. They are doing their fucking best and I’m god damn tired of the nastiness of housed people.

Being homeless does not mean you are a god damn rapist.

That’s the attitude though. Homeless guys are creepy and scary. Do you know why they creep you out? Because you feel like they aren’t like you and that’s gross. I feel like they are like me and they are in a hard place right now.

I don’t need to feel scared of someone who has so little power and authority in life compared to me. Am I prepared to defend myself if someone does start something? Sure. But I’ve been interacting with homeless people for decades. I’ve done so all over the country and in other countries.

I’m not scared of homeless people. They are scared of me.

Why? Because they know I can call the cops and have them put in jail. That’s how the power dynamic works. Can I really? Would the cops do it? Maybe. But it’s pretty likely. If any of you dressed-like-you-live-in-a-house-people called the police on a homeless person there is a high chance the homeless person is getting arrested.

For vagrancy. For loitering. For trespassing. For intimidation. For assault.

Even if that assault was accidental. Who cares? It’s a homeless person. They are creepy and icki. We don’t want them around, prosecute.

Stop. Calling. The. Cops. On. Creepy. Homeless. People.

Unless you see them commit a serious crime, just leave them the fuck alone. Ok? They have enough god damn problems without whiny people harassing them.

(I’m not really talking to a specific person or even the folks in the class. I’m mad at the universe over this one.)

I’M TALKING TO THOSE ASSHOLES ON NEXTDOOR.

“I saw a homeless person on my street so I called the police.” I hope you die slowly in a lot of pain.

Like those assholes who called the cops on me in Virginia. I looked suspicious. I had out of state license plates and camping gear. Clearly I was up to no good.

This is my cranky face.

It is weird trying to find a place where compassion and the right to break your face live right side by side. Because in being able to defend myself like this… I’m trying to have compassion for myself. I’m allowed to say that 12 rapists in one life is enough. I’m allowed to say that I was 25 when I was last raped and that’s god damn when it ended. I’m allowed to absolutely fucking harm anyone who tries again.

That is what compassion for myself means. Maybe another woman could passively permit a rape and not kill her attacker and later prosecute and that would be the most “ethical” choice of all… or something.

I can’t absorb any more.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

How do you get ready to actually be able to kill someone if you have to? I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.

Shit I already feel guilty that people seem to kill themselves after dealing with me.

(Yes, I know I am not “at fault” for any of these suicides. Life is complicated.)

In class someone thought it was funny to make a joke about fire. I sure know how to shut down jokes about fire. It was asked “Does anyone have any trauma around fire? No? Good….” Then I raised my hand. “Yeah, my brother self immolated.”

I bring all the fun jokes to an end.

God I suck.

Hell, I’m not even saying to stop using the joke. It’s ok to jokingly tease a group of people and tell them the final test will involve jumping through a fiery hoop. That’s not a bad joke. That’s not a real threat.

That’s ok.

But god I can kill any joke.

I am so not funny that it is really really funny. It is to the point where my litany of traumas is becoming almost hysterical. I have a trauma for any god damn situation.

It is kinda funny sometimes.

WHEN WILL THE INSANITY END?!?!!? is most of the joke.

Well, I’m still having an extraordinary life… but I’d say it is mostly no longer traumatic. I have boundary violation issues every so often that must be managed.

I don’t think I’ve been traumatized in while. I think the last trauma was severing with my family. (I think I traumatized Sarah after that… but that’s a different discussion.)

Why do I split hairs like this? Because my shrink tells me to break everything down into its smallest compartments and then sort them out.

What is hitting? What is violence? What is trauma? These things are so broad and yet so very specific.

Random defensive pissiness: I read an article yesterday. Don’t remember where or by whom and I don’t care. The person was pretty much saying, “Stop talking about your white privilege because you are just grand standing. If you were really doing anything to dismantle structural racism you would do it silently.” Oh fuck you.

I’m trying to fund the revolution, motherfucker. I am putting my money where my mouth is. I do more with every year and I track it better so that I can know that I am doing more with every year.

Recently Noah told me, “If you don’t feel like you do anything in the world… you are giving more and more money away every year. You are financially impacting the lives of more and more people. That is doing something.”

I don’t do this because I’m a nice person. I don’t do this to be good. I do this because I can never help the child I was. I do this because it needs to be done and other assholes aren’t stepping up.

I’m an asshole. I can live with that. But I want to be an asshole who has specific boundaries around where and how I hit people, how I escalate fights, and when it is appropriate for me to use force.

I think that hitting people to teach them is a shitty way to teach them if you want an ongoing relationship. That style of teaching instill anger, fear, distrust, and the belief in the person you are educating that they deserve to be hit.

Ask me how I’m feeling about Noah right now.

We need something different.

I do not feel traumatized. I feel like I discovered a boundary. I need something different. This isn’t working for me.

I have enough brain damage for one lifetime.

I think that hitting should be used when you are ok with ending the relationship and not before.

If you don’t think I should be packing to leave then we should not be in a physical fight. That needs to be a boundary. And no, that does not mean I should get free hits without retribution. That’s not what I’m saying.

I need to stop hitting casually. I need to be taught through repetition and mostly through words. This behavior will mostly be extinguished through catching the “taps” that “don’t count” because actually they do. They teach muscle memory. They remind me that hitting is ok.

I used to hit ineffectively so I thought it was fine for me to hit people. At this point I’m very effective and that means I need to treat my hands like weapons and be in full control of them.

Things change.

Noah hit back because I hurt him. He has the right. I’m not really mad that he believes he has the right to defend himself.

I’m mad that men start out able to defend themselves with so much force without having to take class after class after class and work and work and work.

I’m not sure that I’m mad at the men. I’m just mad.

I know that I need to get over all the shit that happened to me. But a lot of the places I hurt almost every day are from specific assaults.

Do you think you would be able to forget if you were reminded by your body every day?

Maybe if I can actually heal I stand a chance. Maybe.

Chiropractic appointment in 3.5 hours. I’m going to call and schedule acupuncture for this week. I don’t see a massage therapist for a while but I’ll be ok. Two weeks? I’ll live. Ha.

Cause the next time I see massage therapists I’m uhm seeing two in one day because I didn’t really look at the calendar before booking the second one. That’s ok. One person works on a very small area for the full hour and the other person does a more general massage for an hour and a half. It will feel like magic. I will need to drink so much water that day.

I’m really trying.

Some day I would like to spend less money on health care and spend more money on donating to communities of color. They need the money. I’d rather not need to spend it on my body.

I really don’t think I’m the best place to spend all these resources. But I recognize that it is literally necessary for a time if I am going to heal and be able to do the work I want to do. If I want to stop feeling suicidal because I cannot deal with how much pain I experience on a daily basis… I need to spend the money since I have it. I don’t have a justification for giving it away instead of fixing what is wrong.

Not at this point. Not really. I will be a more effective tool if I stop and do maintenance.

That’s just prudence.

Is that close enough to self love to count?

I’m trying.

Today I am going to spend with the kids. Except for the chiropractic appointment. They’ll do bookwork during that time. We’ll be together the rest of the time. I think we should garden. We’ll read. We’ll snuggle.

I will remind my body that despite these training exercises… I’m safe now. I am safe now.

We need to meditate tonight. During the class I was fucking whigging out for a while. Then I remembered what I’ve been saying to myself when we meditate. “I breathe in nothing that will pollute me; I breathe out the nothingness that has consumed me.” It helped. It helped a lot. The fact that I’ve been practicing at night has helped. I calmed down much faster than I used to be able to.

Jenny tells me that I look at how far I have to go. She looks at how far I have come. I write it down so I can see too.

Attention

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A woman I know told me she wishes she could be more like me. She needs lots of outside affirmation and I’m just confident in myself. I said, “You haven’t seen my blog or my Twitter feed, have you?” I almost told her I am an attention whore. Then I was all, “Hey! That is totally disrespectful to my friends who are sex workers!” so I settled for “attention junkie”. I think that’s accurate. I mean, I’ve only been vomiting the majority of what I think onto the internet for 15 years.

I think one key difference is… I expect to get my attention fix in teeny tiny doses from lots of people because I don’t think any one person can give me much. I think she has a smaller circle.

Yes, I consciously only ask people for a little bit of attention because I don’t want to wear them out. So I collect hundreds of people so that little bit from each person turns into a lot overall.

It’s been a lifestyle.

Top 5 moments of 2015

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My friend has an annual tradition of asking about the best 5 moments you remember from the year.

  1. Crazy Horse Memorial. It touched my soul and I need to get back to South Dakota to spend more time here.
  2. Watching my glorious children swim in the water of the Florida Keys in their bikini’s. That’s a once in a lifetime memory for me. They were so happy. So relaxed. So eager to just find out what it meant to exist in a new space.
  3. I’m going to combine two into one because I’m like that. I had two situations on the trip where I felt uncomfortable. In both cases I packed up and left early instead of creating a big scene. I’m proud of myself. I was not capable of doing that in the past.
  4. I think I will always remember 2015 as the year I came back to Noah. It was hard being gone. It was hard having him come visit then leave again. Having him reappear in my life like this feels magical. It feels like I gift I couldn’t possibly deserve. He is so good to me.
  5. Another multi-thing because ha. Childrens museums. I will never forget what it meant to go from museum to museum to museum seeing what different communities think children need to learn. That was a fascinating, educational, enlightening experience. I learned so much about the size and shape of communities as much as I learned about what the communities expect of members.

I know 2015 was hard for lots of people. It was often hard while it was going on for me. But it was amazing and wonderful and awe inspiring too.

It’s bound to happen to trainwrecks like me.

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I was snarked on a troll site. I was dumb enough to read the thread. I’m an abusive monster says the all knowing internet.

I’m really sad now. It feels like quite an interesting change from the rock star feeling I’ve been having as I nail interaction after interaction of integrating new people and routines and complications.

It doesn’t really matter. The worst things you have ever done are all you are.

And I already knew I was a monster. I knew that long before the kids. So of course it is only natural to think that I am monstrous towards them too.

I spew all my irrational feelings on the internet. I must be a horrible person. Duh. Like, obviously.

You know I write those monster blog posts before the kids are awake, right? It’s not like I spend all day doing this. Ok, right now the kids are awake but there are two other fucking adults interacting with them.

Does my husband step in to protect my children from me? Well, we’ve certainly had conversations about what to tone down. He has absolutely helped me draw boundaries. I picked him because he is both willing and able to do so.

I’m sorry that me talking about the things I like about my relationship with my husband is so obnoxious.

I really shouldn’t have read that thread.

You know, if you truly think I suck… you don’t have to read it. You are allowed to have blissful ignorance that miserable bastards like me exist.

You get to have that privilege if you want it.

The world is burning down.

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There are bombings all over the world in the last few days. People are dying from no reason bigger than hatred that some people think differently.

There was an earthquake in Japan.

I’m… at Knott’s Berry Farm. Well, I was.

And now I’m rocking and crying. Today was horribly triggering. But it feels so very selfish and stupid and petty. God, my whole life is pretty fucking ridiculous these days. Yeah, it will take a whole book to figure out why this trip was worth this for me.

We get home in seven days. I’m triggered as all fuck. This place is hurting me.

We had a wonderful day. I completely held it together. I mediated like a god damn champ when they had a hard time.

And now I’m rocking and hurting because keeping it together today was so god damn hard.

That’s where my father used to finger me. I haven’t been there in more than ten years. I actually come to SoCal pretty frequently. I choose to not go there most of the time.

So, the song I’m listening to on repeat is this one.  

That’s my mood right now.

I think that I’m going to finally find the motivation to get the money from my father’s money that the state is holding. It has waited a lot of years. I think I’m ready to take my payment for what he put me through.

I don’t think the kids know how upset I was. I think I did well. They both gushed all the way back to the hotel about how absolutely fantastic today went. And I really agree.

But there is that part of me and this part of me and today I realized that I… completely missed the anniversaries this year. I think this is the first year I’ve ever just sailed right the fuck past them without noticing.

Am I who I thought I would be by 33?

Is my daddy still the monkey on my back?

What the fuck did I learn out in the Wild Wild West? Oh. Lots.

Hungry for a life I’m not ready to begin.

But it’s time to start anyway.

What does it mean. How forking shallow is it. I don’t know. I don’t know.

You know, it is fucking awesome that I learned how to cry completely silently a long time ago. Otherwise this crying in the room with the kids thing would be pretty fucking awkward.

I’m sorry James. I had to.

I hurt. I shouldn’t be typing nor looking down. And I should be sleeping.

But crying alone is hard. Thank you for keeping me company, internet. I love you.

Noah. I have so many stories.

My fingers hurt.

Must haz self control. Seven more days.

It was really hard going through layer after layer of memories of my father. I think they have substantially changed the area where he used to sit me on his lap. I want to write more. The basic allusion to this is in the book. But oh.my.god I could give a lot more details. Especially right this moment.

I’m having some really really really really really really really big feelings. And I have to just calm right the fuck back down and go to sleep. Tomorrow I have work to do. It is not yet time for me to rest. Only seven more days.

Almost home

Tell the truth.

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Well, I’ve hit my kids. Both of them.

I was leaning into the van trying to find things and I noticed that the kids left a milk container in there. It was sideways and leaking onto a pile of books. I yelled for Eldest Child to get over here and help me. She appeared and I meant to hand things back to her but I misjudged distance. I smacked into her belly pretty forcefully. I wasn’t trying to hit, but I did. We’ve discussed it a few times and I’ve apologized. I really didn’t mean to slap a pile of stuff into your belly. I meant to hand it to you and I misjudged. That’s sucky. I’m sorry.

Then this morning Eldest Child thought it was funny to tap on my face. I said that it hurt and I wanted it to stop, but my eyes were closed and I wasn’t that emphatic. So Youngest Child walked up with a toy and slapped me in the face hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I smacked her body hard enough to get her away from me because she started bouncing the toy on my face again.

I didn’t apologize for the second hit. No, I’m not actually sorry that I hit you hard enough to push your body far enough away from me that you had to stop hitting me.

I didn’t punch or slap that hard. There isn’t a mark at all. But it hurt my bloody nose and I’m not freakin sorry I made your body get away from mine. You don’t get to hurt me.

So, I’ve done it. Shit.

I’m going to have a day of feeling like a bad mother. But you don’t get to hit my fucking face. I don’t care who you are.

Rape & privilege

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I’ve been talking about rape a lot on Twitter lately. I want to organize my thoughts a bit more, even though my arms burn like fire. So this may be a bit choppier than I normally blog. The Twitter character limit formatting is changing my writing. I hope in a positive way. I know I get too verbose for most people a lot of the time.

Noah spends a lot of time telling me that I spend too much time trying to figure out “who is to blame” for various problems. He’s right and he isn’t.

Thing is, dealing with rape is complicated. It is complicated at a personal level and it is exponentially more complicated at the level of a city and … then try to solve that for a state or a country.

My therapist tells me that it isn’t a good thing that the only way I know how to keep myself safe is to keep actual walls between me and other people. Well, it is the only effective method I’ve ever discovered.

That said, I travel more than the vast majority of people ever do. It’s just too expensive for most people. So I put myself in lots of situations. I put myself in situations where I have to keep, not only myself, but my children safe. Am I willfully putting us into danger just to… I don’t know… prove some macho ass shit to myself?

I genuinely don’t think so. Stranger assault is statistically rare. We don’t invite people into our tent/room. We talk to people in crowded public places then move on. It genuinely doesn’t feel risky.

Do you know what was risky? The way I was taught to walk into bedrooms with people because you wanted “privacy” after just knowing them for a few hours. That was how I spent my childhood. Asking to go into peoples rooms and initiating as much sexual contact as I could get away with and only acknowledging rebuffs grudgingly.

Sometimes it makes my heart beat fast when I enforce boundaries with my kids. They are not allowed to walk up and sit on laps any more. Not with a complete stranger. They can’t jump on strange men. Playing for two minutes doesn’t make them close enough to jump on, nope. You have no idea what is going on with their bodies. You don’t know if they just had surgery on their back. Nope. Don’t jump on strange people.

It is really weird to feel like the biggest god damn hypocrite on the planet. Don’t do anything I did.

This experience is how I understand the neglect I experienced. I completely lacked a frame for it before I was a parent. The awareness comes in stages of dawning horror.

How fucking formative that trauma was. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

I’ve been acting like a bully with the kids. I’m not asking them to do things I’m ranting that I’m sick of them not doing the thing without being asked. We are talking about it.

I feel really guilty that Eldest Child said, “It’s getting to the point where it’s almost 50/50 nice and mean and that has to change. I know you are tired. Maybe we shouldn’t go out of the room much for a few days.”

I feel this horrible mixture of pride and guilt that she has to help manage me. She can be aware of those kinds of needs. That’s amazing. I don’t want her to parent me though. I’m not using emoticons even though I want to put like 75 frowny faces in a row.

I try to tell myself that the feelings of guilt and shame are because I was raised to believe it is not ok for anyone to ever have to pay attention to me and take care of me. It is not ok for me to want anyone to help me.

I try to tell myself that this is ok. It is a kind of enmeshment, yes, but we talk about how this is not her job and she is going to not be responsible for me long term. I thank her for feedback about her perception of being around me. I seem tired. I should rest. Yeah, thanks.

She acts like I am worthy of paying attention to. I wish that didn’t make me cry.

I’m going to jump back to rape. Why am I confident that my children will not have a life like mine? A kid kind of grabbed at my kids crotch. The instantaneous response was, “You do not have my consent! Get your hand off!”

I win.

I couldn’t save my niece nor my nephew. But my kids don’t think that anyone who wants to is allowed to have access to their crotch. They believe their consent is vitally important.

I win.

That doesn’t mean they will never be raped. I understand that. Let me tell you, I’m not done educating them. I’m just going at an age appropriate rate.

A lot of “staying safe” is a complex web of knowing the right words to say at the right time. If you have highly specific technical language you don’t seem like a good victim and any good predator will walk right by you. Obviously you have the support to protect you. You are not going to be easy to intimidate.

People comment, just about daily, that my children are so aware and ….themselves. It is funny how often the wording is almost exactly that. Another friend commented that it is amazing that people don’t think Eldest Child is bossy. She just has a good plan she wants everyone to follow.

I talk to them about what they want to get from life all the time.

Eldest Child and I have been talking a lot about what she wants to do school-wise when we get home. She has specific requests. She wants to work on languages more. She is frustrated by the limitations on who she can play with. She freaking asked if we can look for a Chinese class (I can hear Pam cheering from here) so she can work on that more consistently. She said we all should take Spanish together (I’ll see what I can do, Youngest child wants Spanish and is not up for Chinese). She said maybe on Hindi for a while. She said we should practice the alphabet and such at home but she thinks we don’t need that as a formal class. So I guess that will be some structure in our days.

We all want martial arts. The kids want gymnastics as well. I can’t teach them many skills like that. I’m happy to pay someone who can.

And she wants to play the violin.

I said we would add lessons one a month until we got up to the full load because all of that at once would crush her. She says that is probably smart.

I appreciate how often she tells me I’m smart.

You know… I think that’s why she does it. She’s a perceptive little thing.

My kids are not going to look like good victims. Not ever. They are going to seem like… they have all the support in the world. It’s only sorta true, but I’m going to give it my all.

But you know what? This option isn’t exactly available to most people. My kids get a full life of having a Ladies Illustrated Primer walking around with them. That’s not what most people experience.

Holy tomato I love my job.

My kids are in touch with their bodies. They know what they like and don’t like and they consider their preferences to be absolutely worthy of consideration at all times. Good prey act like it doesn’t matter what happens to them. They often don’t know what their preferences even are. “And as much as we cannot guarantee our own safety in this life, we can build resilience to weather what may come.”

I can never guarantee that my children will be safe. Not truly. Not completely. But I can teach them a variety of skills that will increase their likelihood of not only escaping from a lot of traumas but being able to cope with the inevitable tragedies in life.

My children will experience loss and pain. That is a non-negotiable part of the human condition. I know that. I’m trying to teach them how to ride the waves.

We took a break from the screens. The kids begged me to go back to the beach. It’s supposed to start storming tonight and rain mostly till we leave so I said yes. Even though it scared the absolute shit out of me. The kids kept asking me to go sit with the grown ups and just let them play.

No. No. No.

I sat between them and the ocean. There were four good waves where they started getting dragged out to sea and I grabbed them and bodily pulled them back to shore. They stopped arguing with my presence after the second grab. But they really didn’t want to stop working on the dam they were building.

They are fucking obsessed with building dams this trip. They have built them in little itty bitty creeks, rivers, lakes, and the ocean. It was awesome watching them lecture much older girls about how “We have to find a variety of materials to help provide structural integrity! Just sand won’t hold!”

That was why I had a hard time stopping the play. It was so… intense for them. But that ocean doesn’t fuck around. Lots of places are currently flooded and people die from being swept into the ocean all the time. It’s not a game. There are no take backs. The ocean is bigger than all of us.

After the fourth time when I grabbed them and I felt like I barely pulled out of the wave I said, “Ok! That’s it! I’m done!”

The kids didn’t really argue with me. They spent over an hour saying repetitively after we got back to the hotel room, “I think you just saved my life. Wow. You care that much. You are going to stand right there so you can save my life. I think you just saved my life.”

My response is, “I brought you into this world and I’m not giving up on you yet.”

They snuggled with me and looked a bit stunned.

The ocean is not something to fuck around with.

Want to know something kind of hilarious? I had a similar experience with the kid who kicked me in the throat at a group beach trip.

The ocean is bigger than you. I don’t give a shit how strong you think you are. The ocean is bigger than you. Never fight the ocean. You will lose.

So yeah. I think I’m done. If it is storming I am definitely not going down there with the kids. If we want to swim in between rain bursts they have a pool. That is risk enough with a damn thunderstorm.

You have no idea what you mean to me. No forking duh I am going to keep you out of the ocean when it is dragging you like that and you are screaming out in fear. That is my job.

It is both my job to teach you to respect that power and my job to protect you from it as you gain enough experience to have proper respect. It’s a complicated operation.

I think I am really feeling the need to cross reference all of these experiences because I am trying to understand the scope and effects and structure of rape culture. What does it even mean?

Do you know who really taught me I didn’t deserve rape? Sex workers. Grown ass women who were god damn sure what was and wasn’t ok to do to them. I know women who have been sex workers for decades and members of the kink communities for decades who have never been assaulted. I study them with a more than just friendly interest. I want to understand their instincts.

I want to teach those instincts to my children and people who aren’t sex workers have never been able to break them down in a way I can understand. They specifically can talk about what they do to manage risk. I know vanilla women who have never been assaulted. They don’t understand why that is true. They just got lucky.

So I talk to the people who can actually give me the information I seek. I am shameless and mercenary about it.

I’m not teaching my kids to be sex workers. I’m teaching them to think of their body as belonging only to them and never to anyone else.

I am doing my absolute best to raise people who will react indignantly if someone tries to abuse them. My kids interrupt me if they think my behavior is getting near a line. They are immediate in their ability to say what is or isn’t ok about what is happening to their body. It is stunning to see.

I have labored for so many years to try and develop those skills.

Sometimes I feel so jealous I want to shove my head through a window. Just to get that feeling away from me.

My brother used to put his head through windows. They made him wear a helmet whenever he wasn’t in a building with safety windows.

We have really liked hurting ourselves in my family for a long time. I feel so grateful that my children showed mild inclination and were quickly reassured that it is not the right decision to hurt yourself when you are upset. Ask for help figuring out how to handle your feelings when you feel overwhelmed to that point. Your parents will listen to you no matter what.

You don’t have to feel pain. We can maybe help.

I feel so grateful that I found a sperm donor who had excellent genetics and sincere interest in being a really involved parent. This is a wonderful experience to watch.

But Noah has committed rape. And so have I.

Do I think all rapists belong in jail?

Jimminy Christmas don’t ask me. 

This rape culture shit is complicated.

I want my children to be able to do better. I want all the children to have better. Education is the single best route to understanding diverse people and life experiences.

I honestly don’t know what else to do. I need to pick up the kids soon. I’m going to stop.

Kids are wonderful and tiring

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I want to write but my thoughts are scattered and my arms burn like fire. This hotel room table is at a bad height for me ergonomically and I never let that slow me down. I’m kinda dumb.

I’m over reacting to a lot of things. I’m having trouble not screaming over little, stupid things. It doesn’t help that the kids truly are being irritating. What is happening is: I’m pushing them away because I need space and time to calm down in my body. When I push them away they feel freaked out, rejected, and needy so they cling harder and whine the whole fucking time they are grabbing at me in ways that hurt and piss me off.

Next week the kids have scheduled child care. They asked. I feel a little guilty because Eldest Child flat said, “Mom can we arrange a bunch of childcare next week? I know it will be expensive but I’m pretty sure it will be good for all of us.”

Holy crap. How did I get a child this wonderful? This insightful? This aware?!?!?

My shrink regularly tells me that Eldest Child is preternaturally aware of how people work. “7 year olds just don’t care that much about other people. She’s unusual.”

This because my kid can graphically go through verbally describing why people get upset and which contributing factors are likely to bother which person. “It makes sense that you are angry mom. It is very frustrating when I do _____.”

I don’t know if it is weird. This is all I know. My kid behaves this way because I model it. I don’t really know another way to parent.

My kid understands that in some situations she messed up, sometimes I’m the one who messed up, sometimes Youngest Child messes up… the kid is just good at saying, “Ahhh I think this mistake happened because x person was tired and we haven’t eaten. Let’s fix that.”

I worry about teaching her to take too much responsibility for other peoples stuff, but at the same time she’s quick to not take responsibility when she wasn’t involved so… I don’t know. Maybe it will all work out? Who knows. But she is an amazing person. I am so grateful I get to stand near her.

My Eldest Child is so breathtakingly willing to accept consequences for screwing up that I can’t possibly avoid them for myself when I screw up. When I am inappropriate with the kids we discuss making amends. “What do you think I should do to help make up for this mistake?” Because I talk to them the same way about their behavior. No one is above making amends.

If you screw up you must take responsibility and find a way to solve the problem as best you can. Some problems can’t be fixed and you just have to live with the guilt of knowing you hurt someone/broke something. But you can learn how to not make that mistake again.

Everyone makes mistakes. The best people make mistakes every day and learn from them and make new mistakes tomorrow.

You can’t get through life without mistakes. You will never learn all you need to know. Mistakes teach you about fringe cases and important details. Mistakes teach you about how your awareness needs to spread to more areas.

Mistakes are as mandatory as breathing. You can’t grow without breathing and you can’t grow without making mistakes.

It’s ok. We all mess up. Sometimes the mistakes kinda suck and someone gets mad and maybe there’s screaming or a fight or grounding. But then you pick yourself and you keep going. Because that is what life is.

I check in with the kids after I scream at them. “I was a jerk and I was too loud… but I didn’t go over the line and start insulting you or calling you names, right? Was I in bounds that way?”

Once Eldest Child said, “Actually you slipped and called us brats. Don’t do that again.”

Yes ma’am.

I haven’t done it since.

And my children have never had the experiences I had at their ages. They have never been told that they are stupid, worthless, unworthy, a bitch, a cunt, a whore or that they are too pathetic to deserve life.

I have to tell myself that an occasional errant “brat” isn’t the end of the world. Especially when my children have the self confidence to turn around and tell me that saying “brat” is over the line and I need to knock it off right now.

This trip is causing me to see both of my children in a bunch of different settings so I’m feeling increasingly certain that Eldest Child needs to be evaluated by someone other than me. She has a lot of sensory issues and avoidance behaviors that she is developing to cope. I don’t want her to get locked into avoidance as the only way to cope with sensory overload. I did that with food as a kid and it is part of why I have so many health issues.

I’m really grateful that for all that she is hypersensitive to a lot of things… she doesn’t have the food texture issues I had. Thank goodness.

I’m watching her struggle with the same things I struggled with as a child. The things that made me feel helpless, incompetent, and like I was a failure as a human being. I have enough education and awareness at this point that I recognize that these patterns mean there is something not wired correctly. Help is available in the world. We just have to figure out what kind of help is needed and access it.

She struggles at the same things that used to cause my brothers to laugh at me and tell me if I “couldn’t even throw a ball I was too pathetic to deserve to live.” I’m not really sure why sports are so fucking important.

She doesn’t need to have the years of self-hatred I had. We can find help.

I feel sad and happy at the same time. I know enough that my kids won’t have to suffer like I did. But there is this part of me that can’t stop grieving over the fact that no one gave a shit about me for decades.

I know it isn’t true now. I know that I am loved and cared for now. I know that if I am in need of help now I can find it and/or pay for whatever I need.

But I still hurt. I feel like a pathetic, self-pitying bastard. It doesn’t feel like it is ok for me to keep mourning all these layers of shit from my childhood. But I hurt so much.

I’ve barely cried in months because I don’t like doing it around the kids and I don’t have privacy. I’m sure that is contributing to how backed up I feel emotionally. I don’t have a lot of release available to me when I’m alone with the kids. I really and truly need private space for the ongoing processing of trauma.

I have really big feelings about that. I’m feeling a lot of shame and guilt that I’m sitting here crying and whining like a dog because I can’t stop because I haven’t cried in a while.

The kids and I have been watching a new show, “Call the Midwife”. It’s borderline inappropriate for the kids because it deals with some really harsh truths about life in poverty. But I’m not one to shelter my kids from the fact that other people suffer terribly. They don’t deserve to go through life not knowing that other people have it shitty. No one deserves that, in my opinion, and I kind of hate the parents who bring their children up in a bubble such that the kids can’t understand suffering of other people.

Anyway.

Last night the episode talked about the “Workhouse Howl”. The keening, crying screaming noise that only happens when people suffer horribly for years with absolutely no chance of ever stopping that suffering.

I felt kind of freaked out because when the character started the cry… I knew that I make that sound. My kids kinda looked at me when the crying was explained. Yes, I make that sound sometimes.

It isn’t true that I have no chance to stop the suffering any more. But once your body starts crying like that… stopping it isn’t a voluntary thing. It just happens. Once you have been in that much pain for that long… you can’t always keep it in for the convenience and happiness of everyone around you.

Suffering and pain are really complicated and layered. I would like to believe that some day I will get to the point where I no longer hysterically scream/cry sometimes without volition because I have so many pent up emotions I can’t suppress the noise.

Being rich doesn’t fix these problems. Being rich means you can slowly begin to get help, but getting help is a confusing, horrible process. Even though I can pay for help, I have to know where to go for help, who to ask for help, and what kind of help I need to ask for.

That’s hard.

I have to find the solutions and then find people to help me implement the solutions. It’s hard. I understand why people who are struggling with poverty just can’t.

Trauma impacts you forever. I’m kind of tired of people acting like trauma isn’t a big deal and you should just “get over it”. You know what, motherfucker? I am getting over it. I am making progress. It’s still a nightmare. It’s been a nightmare to be in my body for decades. It is slowly improving but I have trouble believing that being inside my body is ever going to be a pleasant experience.

I wish I could stop crying.

Day off- watched Mississippi Damned

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The kids and I took yesterday afternoon off. We got back to the room around 2 and we stayed in from then on. Now it is noon and the kids don’t have any interest in getting dressed.

So after a light breakfast of Lucky Charms I made myself a huge lunch. I had orange juice, two cups of tea, a ham and cheese sandwich, an apple, and carrots with hummus.

I am stuffed and I haven’t drank all my orange juice yet.

And just now my meds hit.

Hallelujah. Today is awesome.

I actually think I might try to talk them into getting dressed around 4 or 5 and heading into Magic Kingdom for the parades and fireworks. That’s going to be our best shot at seeing them.

So of course, being me… I’m watching Mississippi Damned which is about a dysfunctional family. I hear there will be intense incest and beatings later in the movie. (I’m going to spoiler the fuck out of this movie as I watch it. Just so you know.)

I’m in my feels.

It’s not much like my family or my story. But it is based on a real story and I’ve read a lot of responses from women who say this is like their stories.

This is intense. Like, whoa.

This… you know what? I feel like my mama did me a mountain of favors from the simple fact that she stopped dating.

I’m really glad I only had to deal with one crazy abusive father and one demanding controlling step-father and one inappropriately sexual boyfriend. That’s a short list compared to many women.

She had other relationships in her lifetime, but they predate my memory. Like the father of my sister, who denied that he had ever had sex with her.

My mama did find it in her to go it alone. In some ways… I think that was the biggest gift she gave me. She taught me how to be ok alone. I mean, she’s not ok and she’s not really completely alone. But she doesn’t need Romantic Relationships.

Many women my age believe they aren’t safe unless they have a man. My mama taught me that having a man around is never fully safe.

I feel deeply conflicted about what it is that I’m teaching my children.

I’m going to keep doing it. I’m in it. I’m in it till the end. I’m committed. But I don’t know I’m right. You never know until it is over and it is too late to do anything different.

But as I watch a screaming fight over interrupted sex between folks who are married to other folks and a miscarriage and…

You know what? My mama ran from trouble. She taught me that the safest way to deal with most problems is to run.

I don’t know if she is still running. I know I am. But right now I’m sitting on a porch in sunny Florida at Walt Disney World.

Running has worked out okay for me so far.

This movie is about people who can’t run from their problems. They are deeply invested in their local community. They have roots.

I wonder what that would be like.

What would it be like to believe that leaving everything you know means “moving to a fairytale world”.

No, that’s just life. You move. You start over. You meet new people.

You don’t stay in a small town if you are a dyke with a big mouth. You move on. I didn’t have problems for being queer. No one ever gave a shit about that part of my identity. They were too overall baffled by my presentation to figure out what the hell to object to.

(The dyke in the movie just got in a fist fight.)

And she goes home to get hit more.

I left home when I was 18. I didn’t get out because I was smart or because I was more deserving. I got out because I had the resources to do it.

I believe every one deserves a basic income. I really do. People stay in the most horrifying traumatic situations because they don’t have better options. Money is a disgusting tool.

“If anyone is to blame it is you” said to the woman who interrupted the sex that shouldn’t have been happening. Because the problem is the person pointing out the problem, not the problem.

Yeah. I know that dynamic.

Oh god. Murder. Well, that’s one way to deal with cheating. But why did you shoot the woman who was being cheated with instead of the damn man?

You know what? Fuck the sisterhood.

Shoot the man. Don’t defend the sisterhood of “don’t sleep with my man”. No. Fuck that noise. He’s the problem. She is not someone you have the right to demand such loyalty of that the punishment for disloyalty is death.

No. No. No.

I have not signed such an oath.

You know what? I’ve fucked married men. I’ve fucked cheaters. I don’t owe the sisterhood nothing.

Does that make me a bad person? Add it to the list. Whatever.

Oh golly I respect this man. His daughter flat out asked, “Are you a good father?” He said, “Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

Thank you for that self reflection. I appreciate it even though it isn’t for or about me.

“Some daddies aren’t good at being fathers.”

Yeah. That’s the truth.

I’m having feels about Noah. But I’m not going to write about them. I want to forget them.

Oh no. Here is where the incest stuff comes up. This boy was already victimized. He knows how things work. Now he’s the initiator because he thinks it is how it is supposed to work.

Fuck.fuck.fuckity.fuck.

“Get me a beer.”

Words I’m glad I didn’t have to hear much.

“2nd Notice of Eviction” oh I’ve seen that on my door a lot.

“At least I didn’t let some high school crush be the highlight of my life.” Oh that’s something I was afraid of.  I’m pretty sure I’m safely past that accusation.

This fight right here, between the destitute convict and her mother about money and childhood abuse… that’s part of why I never asked my mama for nothing.

“You gotta watch your back in places like that…. As long as you’re next to family you got heart.”

Oh. My. God. From a family with a lot of trauma and incest and abuse. You know what?! Strangers in the big city are not a bigger risk than your family.

Why do I say that? Because being raped by my “friends” was less traumatic than fucking my actual biological father was. (Friends is in square quotes because at this point I no longer perceive that people who would do that were ever actually my friends. They were guys I knew.)

Hell yeah. Grandmama just brought out a shot gun on the man who was throttling her daughter. ROCK ON!

You know what? I’m not that violent of a person. I try hard to find a way to find solutions without violence. But if you are being attacked I think you have every right to a full throttle defense, from yourself or from a nearby person. And besides the bitch didn’t defend her daughters from her own husband. I’m glad she will at least defend them from their husbands.

Yeah, I do believe in bystander intervention sometimes. I know it isn’t popular. I know that it is frowned upon in some circles. I know why. It is dangerous.

Life is dangerous.

It’s not about being a hero and you can’t think about it that way. That isn’t the point. It isn’t about “being a rescuer”.

It’s about paying attention to the people around you and giving a shit about what happens to them.

But people are so complicated. This movie is reminding me how very complicated people are. We are all so hurt.

“You’ve always gotta make it about you, right?”

Well, we are the main character in our own story, right?

But not everything that happens near me is about me. Sometimes it is, but mostly… I’m not the center of everything. I’m just some chick.

It is complicated how some people are in a position to care more about your intentions and some people are in a position to care about the results of your actions and fuck your intentions you son of a bitch.

Now a woman is fighting cancer. Watching how her family copes with it…

That’s why other people believe they need family. They believe they cannot get such support any other way. But I showed up in the queer community at 18. I watched tight, fierce, chosen families.

I’m an asshole about them. But I know they exist. You just have to show up for them. If I wanted to keep showing up in those communities things would have been different.

I ran away. I went home. I built Wonderland and I had babies and I stopped seeing a lot of the people who were my “chosen family”. A few of the people from back then still come around. Not many.

The number drops by the year.

My loyalty to the people who have made the transition into parent-age with me is decidedly impacted.

And more cheating. More screwing underage inappropriate women. Yeah this movie is a humdinger. I believe this is based on a true story. I know men like these.

I am so grateful I am not prey any more.

I am even more grateful my daughters never will be. It won’t happen.

But doesn’t every mother want to believe that? Even when it is right under their noses and they can’t possibly not see.

I try to tell myself that my children are too blurty. Too prone to share all their business with everyone who walks by. Including every factoid I’ve ever taught them about anatomy or bodily autonomy or bodily integrity or…

I try to tell myself that even though I can’t save everyone… I can keep them safe. Yes, I know I’m throwing everyone else under the bus. I’m sorry.

I didn’t throw them there. I just didn’t roll under with them.

But isn’t that how white feminists justify most of what they do?

What we do.

I’ve got skin in this game and make no mistake.

Oh no. Now we get to the college acceptance letter that decides if the next generation of abuse victims is getting out or staying home to just pass it right along.

She did it. She got in.

In time for her most supportive aunt to die from poverty and diabetes.

Yeah. Life is a real shithole.

The aunt didn’t wait until she actually ran out of insulin. She stopped taking it because she didn’t want the end to be slow and by drips. She had no more money for food anyway.

Yeah. Life is like that.

The last thing she did with her life was tell the girl to “get out. Get away. Go be what we couldn’t.”

Perspective is a nasty son of a bitch. I begged my niece to get out. She wouldn’t.

Ok. I can’t go under the bus with you. I can’t.

I won’t make that choice for my children.

Oh god. The most supportive aunt did have some money left. She left it all to the niece in a lump sum for college.

Yeah. That’s how you get out. You have some support appear.

And the lesbian is in the psych ward. Because she can’t move on from her one high school crush.

Life sucks so fucking much.

Do you know what watching these kinds of movies makes me want to do? Log on to my bank account and transfer more money into long-term investments.

I do not want to end this way. They are killing themselves left and right.

I do not want to end this way. I want something different. And that takes money.

Just like my father in the movie the serial predator kills himself instead of taking his punishment and giving that respect to his victims. Fuck you. Yeah, I know bad shit happened to you too. I know.

Take your fucking punishment you son of a bitch. You earned it.

God damn bastard.

I believe people need to be held accountable for their behavior. So I write mine down as it happens so that I can’t rewrite history. Yeah. I fuck up.

Everyone does. Some of us do it big. Some of us do it over and over. Very very few of us tell the truth about it.

I need truth. Even though truth is sometimes not the same thing as fact. Something can be distorted and still be a truth. Because in every truth there is room for many interpretations. It doesn’t mean it is a fact.

How am I defining these.

It can be true that I need to defend myself even if people don’t feel like they are attacking me. I have more than once needed to physically force people off my body on dance floors because they landed on me and didn’t notice that they were crushing a person and, “Hey why are you so mad?”

I wasn’t assaulted. That’s a fact. There was no intent to harm. It is still true that I had to defend myself. Because they were hurting me and I had to make it stop.

There can be more than one truth. Near as I can tell there is no end to the amount of hurt that can be passed around. I think that means there is room for a lot of different truth.

As I sit here in my posh Walt Disney World condo I reflect on how I don’t deserve to be here.

There is no deserve. Jenny, you asked why I conflate people saying I deserve things now with meaning that I deserved things that happened a long time ago. I love you very much and I take the question very seriously and I may bring it up for years as I try to explain it. I hope it doesn’t get annoying. Tell me to get over it if you need to. I love you.

Saying it is a trigger is short hand. Most people who deal with mental illness can tell you that something is a trigger and that’s about as much as they can follow that path. “I have BIG FEELINGS.”

Well, I’m not like that. I was told that I would know when I was in real labor when I was no longer able to speak. Bitch I was articulately yelling instructions while I was pushing. I was popular for bdsm demonstrations because you can beat the shit out of me and in between screams I can drop down into normal speech and clearly articulate what hurts and where and what is positive and negative about various sensations for what reasons.

I’m special.

I can talk when I’m hurting.

I learned. I taught myself. I worked on it because I was told and told and told to be quiet and I noticed that I only got help when I could tell enough of the story fast enough to get peoples attention. I have to be good at an elevator pitch.

And that skill plus running away has provided the most safety I’ve found.

Let me tell you, things work so well with Noah largely because we are both talkers. Speaking of which, I should go call him. Big feelings.

I want to write more about triggers. But I also want to rest my arms.

We’re heeeeeeeeeeere.

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At Disney World that is. Yesterday was intense. It took more than eight hours to get from one hotel room to the next. It was about four and a half hours of freeway driving. I’m not counting the driving time where I got lost in forking Orlando. That took a while. Grocery shopping was sorta epic.

As we drove out to the resort I started shaking and my stomach hurt and I felt like I was about to puke. I kept up a steady chatter to myself, “Krissy it’ll be ok. This will go fine. This is Disney. You are late for check in… they will have people waiting around who are happy to help you. It’ll be fine.”

It was rather ridiculous but hey, do what you gotta do.

We got to the driveway and I started asking just about anybody in a uniform, “I’m new here, which step do I do first?”

They all smiled at me and directed me to where I needed to be.

They are all thrilled to get a Californian. These are the Disney Vacation Club properties, so they see owners and that is a fairly set group of time share people. Variety isn’t as common as you’d think for a hotel.

I had a lot of questions and I said flat out, “I’m going to feel anxious until I have a few concerns addressed.”

You know what? Like magic extra employees kind of backed over to where I was talking to the nice desk clerk. They all smiled like they were super excited that they might get to help.

I fucking love this place.

You know what? They addressed every concern right down the list. I do have to unhitch my trailer, but that’s ok. It means we will be more likely to sneak off to Universal Studios to see the Harry Potter exhibit and that’s exciting.

Oh, parking is right next to our room. This is so fabulously convenient I have no words. I thought it would be a hike. I feel so spoiled. After three months of continuous travel I now think that one of the biggest luxuries in hotels in nearby parking.

I had a very nice person help carry my stuff in from the van with a dolly so I didn’t have to make eleventy billion trips. He thought it was hilarious that I wouldn’t let him carry the heavy stuff up the stairs. It was his first day back at work after a back injury. You aren’t carrying my heavy fridge up the stairs! Heck no!

He thought that was funny. He asked a lot of questions about me and what I do. He was thrilled to meet a writer. He said he had never met one before. Over and over he said, “Whoa. You are one hard working woman. I’ve never seen a woman rush to carry heavy stuff up the stairs for me before. And you home school your kids. And you travel around the country. And you write books. Whoo. You wear me out.” He must have said it twenty times. I laughed.

He asked for information about my books. I gave him all that he needed to find me. Who knows if he will follow up.

It’s a bit awkward to tell people, “I wrote about my experiences growing up in an incestuous family. It’s intense.”

Trigger warnings, baby.

This was all after a hilarious incident with a conservative postal employee in Georgia. I’ve never seen a federal employee retract their implication that there is anything wrong with being queer so damn fast in my life. With a smile.

It’s funny what conclusions folks jump to when they find out you are home schooling.

Nope. I ain’t teaching the Bible. We don’t pray.

I mean, we have many Bibles in the house… but I teach it as one set of mythology among many that humans have come up with over many thousands of years.

It’s just one path out of many. They are all ok.

We were kind of a hilarious experience for my newly adopted niece in Georgia. (Long story.) she is growing up with a Baptist mother and a Catholic father. They attend church regularly. It’s a big deal.

I leaned over and said, “I’m a Godless Heathen.”

Her eyes went wide.

Yeah. That was wonderful.

I said, “You are going to hear a lot about people like me and when you hear those things you can decide for yourself if you agree or not. I’m just one person out of many. I don’t represent ‘all the weirdos’ of the whole world but I do represent a lot of them. When you hear people say nasty things about people like those know that they are talking about me. And think about that.”

She nodded slowly. I was an intense experience for a 9 year old.

I really loved settling into the room here at the resort. We have a system. I explained it to the kids. We all relaxed once the system was discussed and the kids stopped chafing at boundaries every other second.

It was palpable. I didn’t take my medication until after this experience occurred so it wasn’t just that all of a sudden I was stoned and I didn’t care any more. The kids stopped fighting.

It’s been a rough few days. I’m not proud but I screamed and screamed and screamed in the car. They would not stop beating on each other. I mean… they stopped when I went a little nutty. But they would not stop until I went berserk screaming about how they had to Stop Stop STOP.

I felt kind of bad about it until we talked about it later in the evening. I said I was sorry that sometimes I was an asshole when more gentle methods failed but sometimes I really need to be effective. You can’t hit each other.

Eldest Child nodded and said, “Oh I know. We really couldn’t even hear you until you broke our concentration.”

Youngest Child nodded and said, “Yeah… uhh… it’s hard to hear you sometimes when we get into it.”

Then my eldest child looked down, and brushed her head bashfully like we were in a damn movie and apologized.

It was… kind of weird.

YC didn’t apologize exactly but there were amends made. At five it isn’t always a verbal apology yet and that’s ok.

I asked if we could make an agreement to ask for rest any time and every time we feel tired so we don’t whine or get cranky with each other and everyone agreed. They know where their free feeding snack food is. They don’t have to ask me every other minute if they can have _______. It’s glorious freedom.

I think it is hilarious that they both, separately, echoed something that Noah said to me a long time ago in almost exactly the same tone of voice.

“One of the things I like about you is that you make every place feel like home” with a happy sigh to follow. This is in reference to how I set up and organize hotel rooms to within an inch of their lives if I am going to be in them long. I have to or I can’t find shit and that makes me crazy. I have to know where all my stuff is. We have a lot of stuff. That’s a lot of things to put my hands on over and over and over so I can know exactly where it is when I need it.

This is how I comfort myself. This is how I create the order I need. This is how I create the structure and the scaffolding to teach the lessons I want to teach. We are not working on the in-the-room-manners here. That lesson happens elsewhere. Here, we rest. It’s so relaxing and nice.

Only we rest and relax with a pool and a playground a 3 minute walk away so we get lots of exercise right before bed so we go to sleep easily.

This is why I pay for this. Because having people leap to help me with a smile has a cost and I am happy to pay it. I’m told that privilege can’t be bought, but advantages can. If I’m going to be a fucking rich person I’m going to occasionally pay for some fucking advantages.

Oh this is wonderful. And I have to not swear so I’ll get it out now.

Ahhh. Maybe not. I’m feeling pretty mellow. That was a happy fuck.

Cause I’m like that.

Thank you Noah.

I have quite the set up for our little mini kitchen. We don’t get a stove or a full size fridge so I brought our fridge up. The freshest food goes in the apartment fridge so the kids eat it first. The stuff they are allowed to grab at will is in an open container at a tempting eye-height. Other snacks are organized by priority in drawers cause I’m a neurotic fuck.

Tier two foods are things that we will access a lot on the trip for breakfast but they shouldn’t be freely snacked on during the rest of the day or we won’t have breakfast for the rest of the trip. We’re here almost three weeks. Be strategic.

Tier three foods are meal foods that probably require adult help because the microwave is hecka high.

Seems reasonable, right?

Ahhhhhh. Freedom.

It is funny watching them stop asking for things every few minutes. It is kind of weird every time I see this tremendous example they just want to find out what the boundary is.

I can work with that.

Apparently, there is a certain level of beating on one another in the car that brings very unpleasant screaming.

Dude, I was going 60 miles an hour on the freeway, how am I supposed to react? I’m in an unfamiliar area during a frigging interchange. STOP FIGHTING RIGHT NOW.

I get kind of upset sometimes. I’m told I can be intimidatingly loud.

Well if you’d stop when I asked in a more moderate tone dozens of times.

I genuinely don’t know what else to do. I mean, sometimes I use the radio to startle them. But a good loud blast of sound is the only thing I can figure out to do when they go at it in the car.

I do not use the screaming method outside of the car. I separate them. In the car… THEY HAVE A TUMBLING MAT BETWEEN THEM AND THEY STILL REACH AROUND IT TO BEAT ON EACH OTHER.

Oh my. Yeah. Sibling stuff is complicated.

Mostly they get along really well. Sometimes… yeah. We have a long way to go on impulse control. But I don’t have a lot of room to complain. I was way the heck more violent than them.

This trip has had highs and lows, like all trips. I think being at the resort is going to be a high point. We are really excited to explore. We are ready to not be in the car.

The first thing we are doing is going over to child care to talk about options and schedules so the kids can pick times they want to be there.

I’m not sure what I’ll do. But I’ll go do something.

I feel a little weirdly guilty and ashamed. This is such a stupid thing to want to do. What a waste of money and time.

But it will be… so fun.

I love you Disney. Thank you for smiling at me.

Bitch Better Have My Money

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Thank you Rihanna, you inspire me. Nicki Minaj does too.

I’ve been thinking… it would be interesting to go through our financial records. Sometime in the next year before our 10th anniversary it would be interesting to see what we each started with, compare it to Noah’s salary, look at investments, look at the gains and losses for businesses tried and failed…

Who is responsible for which? Noah makes a pretty astronomical salary… but our investment portfolio is growing at a prodigious rate. Some of that is stuff he owned pre-me. Not all of it.

What have I done in the last ten years? Sometimes I have a hard time believing that I have done much.

Ok… even I know that sounds stupid.

I have a hard time being a dependent. I know I “get” 50% of his salary. But what have our separate investment choices resulted in? At this point we can figure out data to see who is actually better at those sorts of decisions so we can assign more of that work in the correct direction to maximize for growth.

I’ve been talking to a lot of womyn about independence and I’ve been listening to a lot of very intelligent women who want me to get my money for my labor.

What has been my cut?

I think I’m going to do that. Oh dear. Another Fucking Project.

And y’all just know I’ll tell you all about it.

The feelings, they burn in my belly.

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I am really struggling with the fact that I can’t wake up and medicate because I’m never sure when or if I’m driving. That’s feeling really overwhelming right now. I’m crispy fried because of the emotional bouncing. It’s getting really hard. At home I create more of a baseline. On the road I don’t have a baseline. I’m taking medication to make sure I sleep every night (or else we would be aborting and going home) but the days are hard.

I’ve been diagnosed with multiple anxiety disorders. It is entirely reasonable that I feel so anxious I want to puke most of the time. It sucks, but it makes sense.

I feel like, if I lived in Duluth and could invite these folks over to my house so they could see my rules in action… we could get along like a house on fire and spend lots of time together. I think if the kids could experience the different sets of rules as a comparison, things would get easier.

I’m a bombastic person. When I am constantly, only, trying to meld into someone else’s rules (when I don’t really know what they are and I’m guessing and trying to not be too offensive) it’s hard. I am hard to deal with when I’m trying to gentle down to other people fast without really knowing the parameters of what is ok.

Different people have different boundaries. It’s hard figuring out. Some people don’t mind the fact that we suddenly shriek loudly in the middle of a game. Other people flip out and act like we are monsters who just burned their house down. Some people don’t care that I swear, some people spend their entire time near me giving me dirty looks and letting me know that they don’t approve.

It’s hard to guess what people will be like.

So we’ve been doing a lot of adapting and that’s super stressful and hard. We’re doing pretty darn well, I think, but my central nervous system is acting like I’ve been dancing on a telephone wire for a few days. I’m getting those bbbzzzzzzt jolts in my chest and I feel jumpy and twitchy and discombobulated.

I am grateful beyond the ability of words to convey that I am being given this opportunity. My wonderful friends are opening their homes and their kind hearts to me. It is stressful because I believe everyone in the world should hate me and want me to die. My friends are being wonderful to me. I am not complaining about my friends.

(I am complaining a little about my friend’s kids screaming “Go away” so many times. But they are kids. I have a “kids are being kids and that’s annoying” complaint about the kids. We’re negotiating and it’s going way better.)

Frankly, after I had some chats with the boys about, “If you want to get what you want to get… let’s find some different words and tactics. I can help you actually get what you want instead of just screaming and pissing everyone off.”

Kids like it when you teach them how to manipulate. Muahahaha.

I told my friend that I didn’t think her kids would like me if I stayed around here long term because they are very impatient and demanding when they talk to her and if I heard it a lot I would start working on them. “That’s not how you talk to your mother. She is not your employee. Try again.” She laughed and said she would love it and she thinks that they would long-term benefit and learn to see the value in me.

Heh.

I told her that lots of kids have strong feelings about me. I’m a polarizing figure. They can love or hate me. Sometimes both at the same time. It’s funny when kids can’t stay away from me because they are so drawn to me but most of what they want to do is hit me or slam things into my shins. Little bastards. We work it out.

Sometimes I wonder if those kids like that I will sit there and discuss boundaries with them verbally in great detail. “If you smack me this hard it feels like a love tap. If you smack me as hard as you did the first time it feels like you are saying you don’t like me and I’m going to get up and leave the room. Don’t do that to me again.” Kid goes back to give me 34,721 love taps.

Whatever.

I don’t know about other people but I’ve always had a bitch of a time figuring out how hard I should or shouldn’t touch people. Folks vary so much. Some people if you touch them gently they don’t notice. They will ignore you and go on with their day. You need to Get Their Attention with a firmness that would be a major boundary violation for someone else. It’s fucking complicated. The line between “Getting your attention” and “assault” is razor thin and you have to dance on top of it sometimes.

I think it is a lot of the reason I needed to hit people so much when I was a kid. I needed to have the experience of finding out that some people barely flinch when punched and some people are on the floor sobbing when you flick them with your finger.

We all get to be different. We all get to have our own experiences of living in our bodies. But I get why it is hard to talk about concepts like assault and rape. There isn’t a standard WAY TO KNOW about these issues because people vary.

If I were kicked in the course of a martial arts class… I would not feel assaulted. If I am kicked in the middle of what is supposed to be not-that-rough-play… it feels like assault.

Context is important.

So many of these things are about individual viewer judgment. I cannot count how many people have presumed to tell me that I haven’t been raped I just made bad decisions.

I’m the one who knows I *did not want* that to happen to me. You thinking that I should have magically found a way to fight harder in order to make it “count” as rape is… irrelevant.

Learning how to fight people off of your body is not an instinct everyone is born with. I’ve had to fight and struggle to learn very hard over many years to defend myself. I didn’t when I was a little kid. I just went limp and let it happen.

I don’t want to be that any more and I want my kids to never be like that.

So it’s my fault I just let it happen. It’s my fault I didn’t risk greater injury so that someone else would feel ok about calling what happened to me rape. I didn’t earn their regard.

I didn’t earn the right to call being kicked in the throat an assault. I would have had to be a perfect victim. I am not. I’m a complicated bitch. I would have had to… I don’t know… been kicked by someone who wasn’t white before people would have been willing to listen.

When I hear white women tell me they are afraid of men of color I snort in derision. I’ve never had a man who was not white touch me nor insult me nor assault me. I mean, I’ve been verbally approached but when I said no with a torrent of swear words they turned away with their hands thrown up. I don’t look like a target to them.

Just to white men.

My kids and the kids who had been screaming “go away” actually got along very well yesterday. I think this is mostly because I was a fascist and I managed to talk my friend into telling her kids to stay off the screens. We play nicely when folks aren’t screaming “Go AWAY” while playing a violent video game where they don’t want to be distracted. If we can’t game together in a friendly way then stop gaming. Go play instead.

I’m going to have to get to a point where I let my kids deal with the fact that if they want to be gamers they are going to have to learn how to deal with hundreds, nay thousands of fucking men and boys who are going to scream at them to go away. This is the softball early version.

This is why I don’t play fucking video games. Too many boys and men have screamed at me like this. It’s not a fucking fun sounding hobby any more. Sounds like a nightmare. I can get to the point of liking something only to have people of a different gender scream hysterically that I have to just GET OUT NOW.

I have huge triggers around this. I wish my fucking daughter didn’t want to be a fucking gamer. UGHGUGHGHGHFGHGHADfoihaweifkjhds;gfh;eovwaekln

AND I’M UN-FUCKING-MEDICATED AS I DEAL WITH THIS GAMER ASS HOLE BULLSHIT

Some day I will have to get over my brothers. Hopefully before my friend’s mother in law does. Holy crap.

In one place we visited we had tacos for dinner. Mother in law *shoved* everyone out of the way to fix a huge heaping plate of taco fillings, then she grabbed a big stack of taco shells and retreated into a corner. There was enough on her plate to feed my family of four at home. “When I was a kid I learned to eat tacos this way because otherwise my brothers didn’t let me have any.”

Aren’t you in your late 60’s? You know how you literally never leave the house because you are agoraphobic? There is some possibility you don’t need to eat like you are doing physical exercise in the Alaskan wilderness any more. You live in a big city and you never leave your house. You probably don’t need to rush to take four peoples worth of food and then eat it as fast as you can swallow.

Hopefully I will get to a healthier relative place than that with video games. I’m not nasty about my kids playing. I’m nasty about it turning into a nasty fight. If there is a lot of “go away” screaming I’m going to get really nasty.

Why are people so damn nasty to everyone? Why in the hell can’t we ask for things without being a complete asshole?

Oh man. Oh shit. The kids nailed me on something. I was talking to the two boys here about tone and shut up and what it means and how it is demeaning and “shut up” is something that is only supposed to be said by someone with power to someone they have power over and that’s a lot of why it is demeaning–it isn’t supposed to be used between equals. It doesn’t work. My darling children turned to me and said, “If it is demeaning you have to stop saying that to us. That’s not ok.”

Shit. I need to stop defining things for them.

First: I WISH I HADN’T PROPERLY EXPLAINED DEMEANING. Then I wish they would let me demean them just a little bit with the odd shut up. Kids say no. We are breaking up with that term.

THIS IS THE CONFORMITY I HAVE REFUSED FOR THIRTY FUCKING YEARS OF PEOPLE TRYING TO CLEAN UP MY POTTY MOUTH. YOU PEOPLE ANNOY THE CRAP OUT OF ME.

But I said I’d try. Eldest said she would be calling me on every slip and reminding me that it is not ok to demean them.

I love that child so much my heart soars. I look forward to knowing you as an adult my precious.

My kids have my fierce requirement to be respected… without all the breakage that makes me brittle underneath. It’s really nice to be around.

Eldest child told me she thought she was “bad” for coming and misrepresenting what the other grown up meant about leaving soon. I said, “Well–I wouldn’t call it bad. I would say it was annoying or irritating or selfish. I wouldn’t say bad. Let’s talk about “bad”. How about if you tell me a few things you think are bad then I’ll tell you a few things I think are bad.”

Every single example she gave me I told her, “Nope that’s annoying. Nope, that’s irritating. Nope, that’s selfish.” She finally said, “If being bad doesn’t mean being annoying or irritating or selfish, what does it mean?”

I said, “Remember how we were at the lake earlier and everyone was having fun throwing rocks?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember how once or twice you threw a little bit to close to someone and M and I both freaked out and said THROW AWAY FROM PEOPLE!?!”

“Yeah.”

Ok, let’s say… oldest boy from that family was being a jerk-face. People do that some time. Let’s say he did something you really didn’t like. If you picked up a rock and threw it at his head… THAT WOULD BE BAD. It could cause a concussion. It could cause him to drown and die. You don’t get to make choices that risk other peoples lives. THAT’S BAD. If I asked you to get out of the swimming hole and wait on the side while I went to the bathroom and instead of waiting you took off and went down the river because you want to see where the river meets with Lake Superior… that would be BAD right now because you are too little. Your body could easily be swept into the current and you could die. We wouldn’t be able to find you and save you. That would be BAD. If you did that when you were 16 and you had more body mass and more awareness of how to keep yourself safe… I’d be annoyed if you didn’t tell me in advance. It wouldn’t be bad.”

“Bad is about risking your life or someone else’s life because you just don’t care enough to treat life like it matters. Bad is not about being a little irritating or a little selfish or a little annoying. Those things are part of being human and people learning how to live with one another’s differences.”

“Many of the things that annoy me now, I will get used to and in the future I won’t feel annoyed. I feel annoyed now because I’m adjusting to a new person–I have to adjust to you every day because you change so fast–and that’s work. More work feels annoying. That doesn’t mean you should stop changing! It means I get to feel annoyed for a while and that’s ok.”

“I love you. I love that you have so much agency and strength and you want to go out and have impact on the world. Sometimes you are going to frustrate the shit out of me because you doing what you know to be right will not be the most convenient thing for me. That doesn’t mean you should change! It means I need to adjust. Adjusting can be a messy process.”

“I’m trying to have patience with you and sometimes I fail. That’s what me being impatient and fussy is about. It’s about me failing to have something I need to have. It’s not your fault and I’m not mad at you for being more than I can handle sometimes. I *want* you to be more than I can handle. But that means sometimes I’ll feel annoyed.”

“Me having feelings does NOT mean that you all of a sudden “are” something because of my fleeting feelings. You are who and what you are. You are not about me. My feelings are about me, not you. Your feelings are about you and not me. You want me to approve of you 100% of the time, so you feel kind of bad when I don’t. Sweet pea, you have to adjust to that too. You need to stop needing to have anyone approve of you 100%. It’s not going to happen in life. You still need to do what is right for you. Haters gonna hate. You need to be you.”

“And we’ve talked a lot about being selfish, right? You have to be a certain level of selfish or you will die. If you are too selfish then people don’t want to be around you. Selfish isn’t bad. Selfish is mandatory for survival. But sometimes you forget that an issue isn’t truly about survival and you are a little more selfish than strictly required and that’s annoying. It’s not BAD. It’s annoying. We all have to calibrate honey. Better to occasionally be a little too selfish because that’s annoying than to be not selfish enough… cause then your body and soul will get sick. It needs balance baby.”

Kiddo snuggled up to me with the biggest, warmest eyes and said, “I love you so much. I’m really glad I get you as my mom.”

I am so glad I get you as my child. Your kindness and generosity of spirit blow me away day by day.

Youngest child wanted to take care of me yesterday. This meant sitting in my lap and singing to me until I didn’t feel angry any more. It worked. I’m not sure I’ve had many times in my entire life when I have calmed down from feeling angry so fast. It was loving and sweet and wonderful and I am so grateful I get to know these people. I feel so loved and blessed. I don’t deserve them but I have them anyway and no one is going to take them from me. Mine.

I’m having feelings about push/pull. But you know what? People are worth figuring it out. The four kids watched All Dogs Go To Heaven together last night (on VHS–a first for my kids) and my friend and I had a wonderful grown up conversation. I really enjoy her company. She’s a delightful, well educated, insightful woman.

And it helps that she is hawt, hawt, hawt. It’s always kind of my friends to be so very easy on the eyes. Sigh.

Ahem. Not that I’m looking.

Ahem.

I’m being good.

I miss you Noah. Abstinence sucks. I can’t even masturbate. I don’t have enough privacy. THIS SUCKS. Eleven more days until I see Noah. And even when I see Noah I have no idea how we are going to make this happen.

Maybe I should go to a hardware store and get some lumber pieces so I can take everything out of the back of the van and put it on little risers under the side of the tent. Hmmmmm. Then I could have SOME horizontal space with a modicum of privacy. Won’t be fancy but I’ve fucked in smaller cars.

I’m thinking about you Noah. I’ll find a way. I’m climbing the walls.

This is the kind of problem I like solving.

Totally want a power strip. If I had a power strip I could put the plug in fridge under the awning and in places where I have an extension cord I could run my computer and the fridge. Like fancy.

I’m not sure what we are doing today. Probably more swimming. Even though everyone but me and my youngest burned a little yesterday. (We were napping in the shade. Like smart people.)

Maybe we’ll wait until a little later in the day and I’ll unload the back of the van and we can go to the farther sandy beach where you can have a bonfire and we can go/stay late enough for dinner. That might be fun. Apparently her family is into fire. I told her that if she and her kids are willing to build a fire my kids would be ecstatic because… I don’t do fires. We’ve been mostly camping for almost six weeks and not one fire to date. She looked shocked. She asked me why not. I said, “My brother self immolated. I’m just not real into fire.”

She agreed that it made sense. Oh good. But I don’t refuse to let my kids near fire…. I just want a responsible adult who is comfortable nearby.

Ha, yesterday at one point my eldest came in and said, “Her eldest (kid said name I’m not doing so) just hit me and I’m not sure why.”

“Well, was it an attempt to be playful?”

“I’m not sure. But it hurt.”

“Maybe you should go ask him, “Did you mean that whack to be playful? Because it didn’t feel playful–it hurt.”

So she did. Verbatim.

He said, “It didn’t hurt. I only did this.” and he did it again. And again my eldest said “OW!”

He looked surprised.

I said, “Well, different people are differently sensitive. My eldest has always had an extremely tender head. Brushing involves crying. She hates having people gently stroke her hair because it feels too intense… it may be that you were trying to be gentle and you didn’t know that you have to be even more gentle than that with her head. She really doesn’t like pressure.”

He looked a bit surprised. But then said, “Oh. Ok I can adjust to that.”

I said, “Yay!” My eldest hugged him. He looked… perplexed.

We are so funny.

Things improved after I got my head out of my ass. I’m telling you, ALL OF THIS WOULD BE EASIER IF I WAS STONED.

I am having a lot of fun here. My children continue to be the center of my world and I am so grateful for them. They make me feel so much joy and love. I feel appreciated. I feel valued.

I don’t feel like my kids are biologically dependent on me so ok fine we are together. I feel like my kids like me.

That doesn’t always happen. I’m very lucky.

Moving south

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Today we leave Dad’s house. That will be hard. I have really enjoyed my time here. Although it will also be a good thing. I’m sleeping for shit. I’m thinking a thousand thoughts a minute about all the things I want to say to him and we save our conversations for after the kids are in bed so… I’m way short on sleep. I need to move on before I hurt myself.

The talking has been wonderful. You know how I sometimes go on these really big tirades and write and write and write about politics and race and rape and incest and money and class and… heh. You know how I “sometimes” do that? Yeah he got the in person version over the last week. He has looked kind of stunned. I’ve never uhm shared my opinions on such a diverse array of topics quite so freely before. He’s kind of re-meeting me.

You want to claim you are my Dad so you need to get to know me. We’ve had several pointed, “Are you committed to this relationship?” conversations.

Apparently his bio-daughter is not very happy about me. I can understand that and I hold no rancor in my heart. I’m sorry that my existence makes her uncomfortable. I can understand why it does. All of the other “daughters” have been girlfriends who moved on. I haven’t. I’m not a girlfriend and I never have been. I’m an adopted kid. Who he has beaten and fucked. Because that has been part of my relationship with all of my dads.

I can understand why that would make someone uncomfortable. I’m on a fucking weird life path.

But he’s ok walking that path with me and I don’t really care if other people approve or not. He is adapting to the changes in our relationship. We have had an incredibly frank and detailed conversation about the changes in boundaries in my sex life. “What if I did ____?” “Well you’d have a time of untangling your fingers from your internal organs after I ripped your arm off and shoved it down your neck.” “Ok then. So you’re saying that is off the table.” “Yup.”

Quite frankly I think this is an incredibly healthy transition for both of us. We are consciously committing to a mutually supportive relationship that doesn’t have to be based on hurting one another. The hurting one another wasn’t a problem when it was where we both were. I’m not there right now. Are you with me or not?

He says he is with me.

He is scared about some of my choices. He asked me last night if I was truly aware of how much I was risking my life with some of the choices I make in terms of activism. I said I was fully aware that women who speak publicly about the things I choose to speak about often get killed. I’m aware that the status quo doesn’t like what I think.

Dad got to hear about the full extent of my suicidality this trip. He’s had dim awareness that I was a cutter.

It is kind of funny to me how people claim to know me… but don’t read my blog… and wow… they don’t know shit. I think I unload my emotions on fewer people than I think. I’m really hard on the people I unload on… but the list isn’t that long. I think I perceive myself as someone who dumps on everyone who walks by… but that isn’t how it goes. I have more boundaries than I think I do.

I am continually surprised to find out that people have known me for a decade and a half and they don’t know major facts about my life.

I can recite your fucking bio in my sleep. I know details about your life before I met you. I can rattle off your hobbies and accomplishments and fuck ups with great specifics.

What the fuck do you mean you don’t know much about me?! WTF!?

I’m self absorbed. Everyone should function like me. Ahem.

I’m going to miss Dad. And I am never going to live near him full time. Our relationship would dissolve and I like it very much. I like the support I get when I see him. He doesn’t have the stamina for me. He can’t be the kind of consistent I need on a regular basis. I can handle what he has to give when I visit once a year. I don’t resent his limits this way. I just adapt while I’m here.

I ask tactless questions a lot to frame how ridiculous we both are. “So my control freak issues are running into your control freak issues. Which part of this one is your real bug-a-boo? The process or the result because you vary from issue to issue.”

He kind of glares at me for a minute as he thinks about it. Then we discuss it and work out how we can adapt to one another.

It is weirdly a lot of fun for me. He is really ok with blunt negotiations. The bdsm community has been good for him. If you can say, “What I really want to do is tie your legs wide open so I can single tail your clit” you can have a conversation about just about any stupidly specific and personal topic.

Ok.. that isn’t actually true about everyone in the scene. But it is true of the two of us and I love that about him.

We’ve talked a lot about eating and dietary choices with the kids. Exercise habits. Modeling and why we do the things we do. Being responsible to and for our kids and how that creates a permanent reason to take care of ourselves because… we owe them a long life.

He says I have made him think about many of his choices in new ways. I believe that.

Last night he told me he feels adrift and he isn’t sure how to get ahead of the curve. He’s had a really hard several years. I said, “That sounds like a request for advice.” He said yes.

Oh I gave advice. “What you need to do is over the next year ask for help from Person A and Person B and Person C and go through the house and the storage unit. Sell anything you don’t have a really strong desire to keep. Donate what you can’t sell. Time to downsize. You don’t need a big house and property and you can’t keep up with the work. Sell before you degrade the house and can’t make money back. Buy something outright. Buy something small and manageable.”

He has inherited the estates of three rich people. He has an overwhelming amount of stuff and he simply can’t afford to keep the shit. He didn’t get the money. That went to charities. He just got burdened with the shit.

People are hilarious. They really don’t think about what they are doing to the people around them.

Get it in your head that you are putting the house on the market in June of 2016. That will be the end of your time here. 14 years in one spot.

It’s going to be hard to leave. His second marriage had its whole life here. But she’s gone and he has to move on. He can’t support this household without her.

Life is about constantly changing your goals as your resources and abilities change. Things go up and down and you have to be realistic about your capabilities or you will over-promise and under deliver. Or you can sell yourself short and never attain the things you are capable of doing.

Re-evaluate yourself. Where do you want to be putting your time and energy? Do you really want to have to spend 30+ hours a week on cleaning and house maintenance only to watch it fall into constant decline because it really needs 60 hours of work every week? That’s depressing. You feel like a constant failure even though you really are doing your best.

I’m going to cry a lot when he moves. This is Francesca’s house. She loved me here. She made me feel safe here. She is a lot of the reason Dad and I worked out some bumps in the early years. I miss her very much. But our obligation to her is over. It is time to sell off her stuff and her step-dad’s stuff and her mom’s stuff and move on.

She died before we could pay our debt to her. That’s a guilt we have to bear and move on with.

We can take that and pay it forward. That is how she would want us to do it. She wouldn’t want us to wither at home with shame and regret. She would want us to pay it forward. She would say we don’t owe her. We owe the universe. It’s never really a two way street.

That’s what is so hard about parenting. It’s never really reciprocal. I have taken more from Dad than I’ve given. Mostly… what I can give at this point is support as he transitions to a different sense of self.

He’s not a swinging bachelor of means. He needs to stop trying to act like he is. That time of life is over.

There are consequences to not seeing how you are changing. How many do you want to have smack you in the face?

He asked me if I believed he was capable of change at this point in his life. I laughed and said I wouldn’t be in his house if he hadn’t changed and changed again over the last decade and a half. Yes. I believe you are capable of changing. It’s not the tooth fairy. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen you adapt. I’ve seen you resolve to improve on how you manage specific issues. Yes, there have been back slides in some areas, but you continue to improve in broad swaths.

But life is complicated. As you improve in some areas you completely screw up other areas. That’s how it goes.

It seems to me that wisdom is partially understanding that you will never be good at everything. You will never have the inter-personal abilities plus money abilities plus physical abilities plus education abilities and and…

Look at what you actually do with your time. You are good at parts of it. The rest… well… it’s done enough. THE HOUSE DIDN’T BURN DOWN. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!?!

I don’t cook much. I can’t do it. I turn into a screaming banshee.

It’s not that I “can’t cook”. I can actually cook quite well. But I need to be calm and have a lot of patience and a lot of quiet and a lot of time and nothing else going on in order to do it in a peaceful way. Or I start twitching and shrieking things like, “JUST GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN BEFORE I STRANGLE YOU OH MY GOD WHY DID YOU THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO DO?!?!?!!?!”

I understand that this is part of an age old tradition between mothers and daughters. But with the whole home schooling thing… it’s a problem if I won’t show them how to do things. So it’s complicated.

I’ve been priming the pump with the kids about how things will shift when we leave Grandpa’s house. We are going to a dun dun dun… screen free house. Ok, they own a tv. A big one. But they don’t turn it on. Or they use it for internet browsing. They watch very occasional cooking shows or Myth Busters. They are basically a kid screen-free house.

So uhm, don’t spend all day talking about video games and cartoons. You can talk about books, games you like to play, imaginary stuff you like to do… lots of topics. Don’t spend all day talking about the Minecraft tutorials. That is horribly boring when someone isn’t interested. We won’t be there very long. Be polite.

I have no idea if Shanna is listening. We’ll see.

We came here from Aunt Cookie’s and her only tv watching is Martha Stewart show reruns and Mayberry because her parrot will repeat things from the television. She won’t risk a peppery word in her house. (I kind of horrified her. And the kids taught the parrot to say “poop poop poop”. She was not pleased.) It’s not like we can’t get along with folks who don’t do video games. But she had to listen to a lot about the tutorial makers. Her eyes glazed over. I tried to rescue her.

Shanna can give you a full run down on the benefits and deficits of different tutorial makers and I think it is hilarious. I only half listen. I stood and listened to the new one for a few minutes last night. I wasn’t pleased. He’s an asshole. I told her flat out, “I like so-and-so and I like that other guy because they are silly and kind in how they give instructions. I don’t like this new guy. The way he is saying his friend might not really be a boy because he hasn’t seen proof? That’s bullshit. That’s a jerk thing to do. Questioning someone else’s gender is not ok. If I ever hear you do that, you aren’t watching this channel any more. If you want to know that assholes like that exist I’m not going to stop you from finding out they exist. But you had better not become one.”

Her eyes were kind of big. She nodded and said, “I wouldn’t do that. I just thought it was cool how he built _____.”

“That’s fair enough. He did build a cool ______. I can see why you would admire it. Feel free to learn his Minecraft skills. Don’t learn his interpersonal skills.”

“Got it.”

Man this is a quoting-myself-heavy-post. I want to share it with Noah. I miss you, oh my witness. I WANT TO TALK AT YOU FOR ABOUT TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT.

I miss you.

I’ve gotta say, it’s kind of wild talking about a lot of the things I write about. To an entrenched white male. Oh man. It’s interesting phrasing and efforts. I have extreme biases. I’m aware of that. I’m working on and with where I am right now.

Dad is a soft sell on many of my more radical ideas. He will listen and help me construct rebuttals to arguments. Not necessarily on purpose, but he argues with me and that gives me practice debating the things I’m going to need to be able to debate without shrieking.

Not sure I can ever be a cook in a high pressure situation though. That may be beyond me in this lifetime.

Family

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Dealing with Noah’s family is complicated. I am not that inclined to shut my mouth and put up with awful because… I get no positive out of knowing them. I mean, his parents send money and his aunts send boxes of candy around holidays. If these windfalls evaporated from my life I wouldn’t miss them. I don’t plan for the money. I feel awkward about accepting it. I accept it because they are Noah’s family and they have the right to give him things.

I don’t care. If I never heard from any of them again I would be just fine. They are not integral to my sense of self. They aren’t my family. Why should I make myself smaller in order to make them feel like they are correct?

Nope.

I have nothing to gain by keeping my mouth shut and letting the status quo continue. The status quo is not a good place for me.

Silence in the face of atrocity is how I ended up with the horrifying childhood I had. I’m never going to be silent again. Even if it offends the shit out of everyone. Even if I never get another box of candy.

Right now I’m watching a movie about Grace of Monaco. It is fascinating watching Nicole Kidman pretend to learn the history of the country so she can take on the role of princess. I can see why she learns what she learns for the sake of her children.

My children don’t need me to learn how to be a serene highness. Thank G-d.

But I need to consciously try to facilitate them having relationships with these racist fuckers. Why? Because they are family. I’m not part of the family. Not really. I am a facilitator. I am an extension. I am Shanna and Calli and Noah’s family. I am not Aunt Cookie’s family. I am not Aunt Candy’s family. I’m the mother of their great-nieces which isn’t the same as family. I’m unavoidable but I am not likable.

So I drive the kids around the country. And I take dictation as they write letters to these people. I will help them make phone calls when they get just a bit older. And the whole damn time I will be arguing with the messages they receive.

No, your family is not superior to other people. The relatives who tell you that you are better are lying. You are just a person. A wonderful person, but just a person. You need to earn your own merit. It is not automatic based on your appearance.

We had an interesting conversation yesterday. The Godmamas came up again. In reference to some people are ok with mellow yellow and some people really aren’t. Shanna made a comment to the effect that we are better people if we are more worried about the drought than the cleanliness of our toilet.

I told her that the two have no relationship whatsoever and she is very wrong if she believes that one measure like that decides what makes a good person. I am *not* a better person than your Godmamas. Well, they aren’t the Godmamas any more. I’m still not a better person. I worry about different things. I focus on different things. I spend my time and energy in different ways. Doesn’t mean I’m better. I’m different.

I don’t think I’m better than Aunt Cookie or Candy either. Even if they have opinions that are distinctly racist. Even if they have dozens of opinions that make me sick to my stomach… that doesn’t mean I’m a better person.

I’m a person with giant flaws, just like everyone else.

I need people to call me on my flaws in order for me to grow and change and become better. I am better than I was. I’m not perfect. I never will be. I do not aspire to perfection. I’m an asshole and ok with that.

The difference between me and the aunts is… I know I’m an asshole. They would hotly deny that they are. Even though they believe that people who end up homeless deserve to suffer. They think that their beliefs are just “justice”.

But I’m the only one who knows I’m an asshole. I think that human beings deserve dignity and support so I’m an unconsciounable asshole. Good thing I can live with that. I can be the kind of rude where I challenge racists in my life. I can’t be the kind of rude where I just shut up and allow people to be awful. I do not choose going along with the flow for the good of bigots. I do not care about avoiding conflict. If you want to avoid conflict with me you can leave the room.

That is the assurance that men walk around with. If you want to avoid an argument with them you can leave the room. I’ve decided that it is a trait and I want it. So I adopted it. I don’t back off.

I wouldn’t be here if I were more namby pamby.

I’m not important. I’m not special. I’m not someone who changes things. My reality distortion field only extends as far as my voice can reach. Maybe that is why I am so fucking loud now.

I didn’t used to be loud. When I was a child I was constantly in trouble for mumbling. No one could ever hear me. I got yelled at by dozens of teachers because I would raise my hand and then no one could understand me.

I don’t have that problem now.

I’m also getting better about being able to challenge people without having to scream at them. It’s progress. Now I can challenge in a flat voice. That’s a big improvement and I’m happy about it.

I have no interest in learning to avoid conflict. I do have interest in learning how to have conflict without acting like a harpy. Conflict is fine. Conflict is about challenging the status quo. I have a serious problem with the status quo. I want to change it.

The status quo involves too many people suffering terribly because of structural inequalities. I’m not ok with that. Structural inequalities need to be addressed. We are at a point in history where we have no justification beyond pure greed for continuing to allow this many people to live with starvation and homelessness.

We have major structural racial problems in the world. Not just in my country. Acting like they aren’t real is… not something I can do. Not even to make someone feel more comfy about how short sighted their world is. Can’t do it.

I will always be willing to point out real, hard things. Even if that makes me an asshole. I think that is my role here. Sometimes I’m wrong about the things I think I see. That’s highly inconvenient.

Sometimes I don’t know how to translate what I see into useful words that other people can understand. Frequently I don’t know the approach that will spur other people into seeing things as I see them. I don’t know how to be the universal translator. I wish I could be.

I wish I could be.

Lots of big feelings

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The trip is going well. I am so gosh darned tired I feel like I might slip into a puddle and never solidify into a solid being again.

I had a hard time with Noah’s aunts. They grew up in particular times and places and they believe what they believe. Unfortunately for them there is a whole bunch of evidence proving that their beliefs suck.

I am highly dysregulated. I am having a hard time calming down. Too many conversations about poverty and homelessness and race. I really don’t respect the opinions they have.

One aunt spent a long time telling me about how much she enjoys reading the journals of settlers and colonials. They only killed people when they had no choice.

Uhm… go read something written by the folks that the settlers barely avoided killing. You will hear a very different story.

No. The white assholes who showed up on this continent because they were being chased out of their European homes did not kill Native Americans because the Natives were trying to persecute the white people. No. No. No. No.

We are interlopers here. We do not get to claim that our existence here is just about our basic survival. We are stealing in order to survive.

Depending on how you look at it, all humans have been thieves since the beginning. We steal from plants and animals in order to survive. That’s complicated. It’s a hard ethical conundrum. Vegetarians believe that by not eating flesh that you are fine for how you are stealing. Vegans think it must be even more strict and milk and eggs are also over the line.

But no one ever objects to stealing from the artichokes or carrots or cauliflower. We’ve decided they can’t matter.

But that’s kind of funny.

Throughout history many groups of human beings have decided that other groups of human beings don’t matter in similar ways. Sometimes we make these evaluations based on race. Sometimes based on economic privilege. Sometimes based on work choices. If you look around the planet, folks feel free to shit on sex workers in almost every country that exists. Even though sex work is one of the most universal, oldest professions that exists. We still want to punish any individual who engages in it.

Why?

One of the aunts spent a lot of time telling me that she hated the Occupiers and she thinks folks who are homeless are just lazy and they need to get a job.

I told her, are you aware that it takes two or more full time jobs to afford rent, not including utilities or food or a car in most states for people who work minimum wage? You bought your property in 1981 with help. No, other people can’t do what you did. It is really awful for you to think that people who can’t do what you did are lazy. How dare you.

You bought a property for fairly cheap. You had help for 20 years of your mortgage. How dare you say that other people who can’t do what you did are lazy.

Are you aware that historically speaking black people have been shut out of owning property?

This is not about lazy.

Are you aware that the largest race riot in our American history was white people who were jealous that black people were doing too well? But we’ve had a lot of race riots. Mostly they erupt because white people are persecuting non-whites. It is bullshit.

I don’t deal well with people who are incapable of seeing the layers of privilege that built their lives. We are all made up of support and relationships with people. Unfortunately there are major demographics who have traditionally not received support. And they are currently struggling much more significantly than demographics that have traditionally received more support.

I want to equalize that. We can’t go back and fix everything bad that has ever happened. I don’t want to. That’s not the point of life. But we can make it so the people who are alive right now have more access to ways to better their lives.

We don’t have to punish people for being disadvantaged. We don’t have to punish people for being icki and poor and not what we want to look at. We can choose compassion. We can choose to help people just because they exist and they should exist.

I want you to exist. Even when I don’t like you. Even if I want to shout at you because your opinions are just flat terrible.  You do worthy things. Even if those things don’t benefit me in any way shape or form. Not everything is about me.

Not everyone has to benefit me in order to be worthy.

I’m getting better at defending the intensity of my opinions without having to scream at people and tell them how much I hate them for having the opinions they have. I’m glad for that. I am modeling better behavior for my children. I am teaching them to be fierce, but not mean.

I’m trying. I’m trying to model what I think should exist. Have strong opinions. They matter. They help. They are important. But try to express them in a way that will educate instead of alienate.

I really suck at that.

Last night was so awesome. Dad and I got stoned together and I unloaded on him. He’s not an emotional guy. He doesn’t really want to hear about feelings. Ha ha mother fucker. You adopt me and you get what you get. If you want to be my Dad you get to find out what I’m like. And that means listening to an hour or so of emotional unloading every other year or so. Suck it, buddy. Just cope. You can manage.

He did. He’s wonderful to me. I listened to what was going on with his life. He is struggling more than I am. That’s… kind of weird to me. He’s supposed to be the stable grown up. Only now I’m the stable grown up. How the fuck did that happen?

He’s had a hard time since his wife died. Things have been rocky. It makes sense. That has been seven years now. His business failed and that was really hard financially and emotionally. He likes his current job, but it doesn’t pay that much and he has a lot of bills. Complicated. He’s really depressed.

He expresses admiration for my obsessive saving. Which is awkward. I appreciate his positive feedback on my skills but it is uncomfortable too. I don’t think I should be doing better than other people. That is not my self-perception. If I do something well, emotionally, I want it to be because any one can do it and it isn’t very hard. That isn’t true any more though. I’m good at a lot of things that most people suck at. I am an incredibly skilled person.

That’s hard to accept sometimes. I don’t ever get to use the excuse that I just can’t any more. I can find a way. That’s daunting. Overwhelming. Too much pressure. I don’t want to be able to find a way. I want to have the excuse that I don’t have to.

But I’m exceptionally competent. If I don’t do something it is probably because I choose not to and not because I can’t. That’s…

Shit. I’m out of excuses. I like excuses.

Talking to Dad is intense on a variety of levels. As the years go by I am increasingly willing to share my opinion on what I see. “You are selfish in a short sighted way. If we could get your selfishness to see the long-view then I think your romantic life would improve.” He is strangely willing to listen to me now whereas ten years ago he snorted and said what the hell do I know.

Now he’s had two marriages go badly and mine is doing well and he’s willing to listen.

He spent a lot of time questioning whether I was on the road trip because my marriage is rocky. He had a really hard time believing that Noah would be ok with this kind of separation unless we were on the verge of divorce.

Nope, we are very happy together. Lots of sex. Lots of good conversation. We really enjoy one another’s company. But I’m a traveler and he’s not. He loves me anyway just like I love him for being a home body. We are ok with supporting one another through divergent experiences. We don’t have to do everything together. It’s ok if we are different.

It is part of why I am so very happy to be married to Noah. He doesn’t want a Mrs. Noah Gibbs who is there to facilitate his life. He wants to be partnered with Krissy Gibbs. Who is bad ass and does cool things.

He’s bummed when people think I’m cool because he married me. He thinks that is missing the point of me. I am not cool because he sticks his dick in me. I’m cool so he wants to stick his dick in me. People should get the order right.

I really like Noah. I am ridiculously happy to be married to someone who trusts me and who works as hard as he works. I like hard workers. I like people who pick goals and then put their head down and accomplish them come hell or high water. I really like Noah. He inspires me. He also taunts me and I want to punch him for it. But I don’t because we do not have that kind of relationship.

Noah causes me to think really hard about my ever expanding repertoire of skills. He isn’t ok with me minimizing my abilities. He says, “Nope. You don’t get to think you are incompetent any more. You probably never were but you don’t get to think it now.”

I cannot express what knowing him has meant to me. He believes in me. He believes in me the way other people believe in G-d. He thinks I can just do things. So I can.

Thank you.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to the world if everyone had someone who believed in them as much as Noah believes in me. It would be a really incredible planet. I wish I could see that planet.

I want to be part of a world where people build one another up instead of tearing each other down. That was the hard part of dealing with the aunts. I didn’t want to tear them down in the process of educating them and that is hard. Tearing people down is so much easier than building them up.

How do you teach people to see that they are privileged because they grew up with a highly educated parent who had the ability to teach them a variety of skills that other people never know exists? How do you teach people to see that they are lucky and blessed because they got to have abusive help for a period of time?

Some people get no help at all. Not even packaged with abuse. No one wants to help them from the get-go.

Can we get over this idea that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? That’s a crock of shit. The people who survive and who do well are people who have neighbors who show up to help. Not people who do it alone.

I’ve tried doing it alone and I’ve tried finding a network of support. Finding the network is horrifyingly hard. It is emotionally draining and hurtful. There are hundreds of false starts. It feels hopeless most of the time. But then you notice that this time when you fell down someone was there to grab your elbow and keep you from landing on the concrete.

I believe in the MonkeySphere. I believe my connections to human beings are the reason I am alive. Mostly through Shanna and Calli and Noah, but my friends are important. My friends matter so much.

If I weren’t at Dad’s house I wouldn’t be able to see the extent of how much he loves me and would do if I needed it. He’s never going to be able to provide financial support–he might need it in the future. But he has been emotional support for almost 16 years. He has supported me through many different changes in my life. He adapts with me as I change radically and he really wishes he didn’t have to.

I see you. I appreciate you.

Looks like my kids are going to be his grandkid experience. His bio-kids are respectively one and two years younger than me. His son is only going to have children if there is a catastrophic accident and he’s considering pre meditative surgery. Just to be safe. Dad’s bio-daughter is 30 and doesn’t have a partner. Her mom would like her to have kids but she isn’t real interested in single parenting and things aren’t lining up.

It is weird seeing that I am creating a place for myself. I am in the middle of generations. I help interpret going up and going down. I really appreciate that I get to spend so much of my life teaching people how to get along. Kids and adults. That probably isn’t how other people see how I spend my time… but it is how I see what I’m doing. I give other adults a lot of feedback. I try to do it in ways that won’t cause them to turn around and yell at me to back off (I’m pretty deft) but I’m a bossy motherfucker. I’m going to volunteer my view whether you like it or not.

And there are people who keep me around even though I’m highly obnoxious. My life is great.

Last night I told Dad that I feel very safe unloading on him at this point because I know that he likes having me around. He laughed and asked why I am so sure. I said, “I’ve watched you for a lot of years. When you are done with people you get mean. Your jokes are more and more cutting. You point out their flaws more frequently and with more venom. It is hard to watch when you are doing it to people I like. It is part of why I don’t spend more time with you. I don’t want to wear out my welcome. You have never treated me that way and I want to continue this trend.”

He got quiet and thoughtful. After a while he nodded and said, “You are right. I do like you a lot. I’m not sick of you.” He didn’t say that much more about it. He’s not the sort.

I’m sitting in Dad’s back yard resting. I’m thinking about doing some weeding. He’s been really sad and just isn’t keeping up with the house and yard. I cleaned his pipes this morning. If you are going to pollute your lungs, at least don’t do it through an inch of tar, come on.

I’ll clean the kitchen after lunch and before I make dinner. Boy it needs it. I’ll probably clean the bathroom tomorrow because there is mildew starting. This house is more than twice the size of my house, I can see why he is having a hard time keeping up. He used to be able to pay help and now he can’t. I think he should down size but it’s complicated.

Everything is complicated.

Maybe the girls and I will come out here and weed his beds and run over to a nursery. We can put a handful of low-maintenance veggies in so he continues to feel loved after we leave. It is weird how plants do that. I don’t understand it, but I’m starting to see it and exploit the loop hole. Yay for exploitable techniques.

Holy moly we’ve been seeing great yards. Aunt Cookie and my friend W have gorgeous yards. These ladies are accomplished. It was a real treat to visit and see the results of their hard work. I feel so inspired. I need to touch some dirt. I need to put in more plants. The planet needs more plants.

Maybe I can ask him if one of his beds can be a wild flower seed mix for birds and butterflies. So when the flowers come up he can think of us.

We love you and we want you to be here.

I love pot. Today I’m not driving so I’m heavily medicated. Right in this moment I feel like if the biggest burdens in my life are dealing with some classist, racist, mostly decent people… I can work with that. I like educating people. I will learn how to talk about these topics. It is very important to me that people like them learn why they are wrong. I understand that they will be more likely to listen to someone they perceive as being like them. They see me as being like them.

They are wrong as fuck, but that’s ok.

It’s an exploitable loop hole. No, I’m not like you. But I know how to ape some of your class markers and I have learned to do so out of self-preservation. I have learned how to make people like you stop hitting me. I’m not like you.

I’m never going to stop being a fierce person. I believe it is necessary. But I want to learn how to temper it when I choose. I want it to be more under control. I want it to be a tool in my tool box and not the defining explanation of what I’m like. I believe that being capable of violence is necessary for self preservation. I’m going to get better at being lethal and learn how to stop the bullshit posturing.

I don’t need to win the dick contests. Even though mine is bigger.

I don’t like what I win. How is being the biggest dick a good thing?

Well, it’s a good thing when I can get men to back the fuck off of being bossy and/or controlling but quick. There has to be another way.

I struggle with the grey area of wanting to be more open and inviting and wanting to be all go the fuck away.

What is the path? Who knows. I’m just walking.

Slow week. Thank goodness.

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We see friends on Friday. We don’t see friends till then. I think this is very good. I think this is very important.

There gets to be a point where my skin is so thin that if someone breathes too hard I bruise. I’m there. It’s emotional as well as physical. My body hurts so much. My belly has been hurting for days. I am having an “IBS attack”. Horrid cramping and diarrhea and pain. That happened all weekend at the con. I had some big fucking feelings.

Watching how people act is very important. I act like a wounded animal. As a result I’m kind of unpredictable. That means I’m the problem. I understand. I’m used to that.

I’ll stay home and keep my issues to myself.

Your fucking problem you stupid bitch. Just shut up. Shut the fuck up you stupid fucking cunt.

It’s not one thing. It’s everything. I am so upset. But! At least these days my very upset is mostly limited to writing bitchy things on the internet. Really…. this isn’t even that bitchy.

I’m not saying in detail all the mean things I’m thinking. I’m suppressing them. Don’t ever fucking say I don’t have tact, motherfucker.

This right here, this is tact.

Meeting bronies was fun. I won’t be going back to that convention.

I HAVE ABOUT 389,287,927 MEAN THINGS I WANT TO SAY TO PEOPLE RIGHT NOW.

The bad thing is the list of people I want to say them to is only a few thousand names long which means I have a high density of mean things I want to say to just a few people.

But I won’t. Because I’m a grown up now. That shit has consequences. I haven’t matured, I’ve just developed a super ego.

I think it is very weird that I am so worried about consequences from people who already have given the only consequence they have to give: revocation of their regard.

I am not worthy of support or defense. My problems are mine. And if I’m too nasty because defending myself is kind of hard then I will be ostracized because I’m the problem. Not the people hitting me; Me. Not the people defending the people who hit me. I’m the problem.

Do I want such people to like me anyway? What would I have to believe about myself in order to act in a way that they would support? I would have to agree with the premise that if I am kicked in the throat I deserve it and I should apologize for it happening and I should offer to try to stay away from people in group situations because I’m the problem.

Uhm, no. That would not be good mental health.

Group cohesion over the physical safety of group members can bite my ass.

If I lose friends over having that opinion… they were never my friend. They are just somebody that I used to know.

I feel like a tremendous asshole partially because this little drama is happening off-stage for most of the group. I haven’t even talked to many people about it. I didn’t ever tell the group organizer. This is me having made a mistake about the level of support I might expect from one person. And I’m looking at running from the whole group over effectively two families. The one with the kicker and the one who told me to promise that I won’t be a problem any more.

Why do I turn that into “the group”? Why do I do that? I’m having conflict. I haven’t tried to work it out verbally since my one failed attempt. I have not really given an opening for any kind of backpedaling or attempt at any other kind of resolution.

Err, doesn’t really seem “wise” to do so.

I’m having a big problem with the fact that I simultaneously don’t feel like a victim (it was a kid fucking up–not a deliberate assault from an adult… it’s just not psychologically the same thing) and I feel like I’m being victim-blamed.

There’s a lot of transference going on, clearly. This is becoming the “situation du’jour” for me to project my abandonment issues and reenact stupid shit from my family. “They always pick the abuser.” I’ve put a noticeable amount of time into this specific set of relationships. More than I’ve put into the vast majority of people I know.

I guess… I guess I lacked the perspective to understand that this amount of time is very little and very unimportant to people who have had lives very different from mine. Time dilation is a problem for me.

I’m not reacting to right now… only I am. This weekend was very frustrating. The kids… it was a boundaries testing weekend. Those happen. Children are supposed to do that. It is how childhood is supposed to work. I have stacks of books that tell me this will happen. It was a rough weekend.

And then the hotel staff threw away a bunch of the Easter eggs. Because some of them had unwrapped jelly beans in them. I tried to get individual wrapped things of jelly beans and they wouldn’t fucking fit in the eggs. Then when I asked if I could have back the bag of eggs that weren’t hidden or given to children… the person running the hunt said, “Next year buy toys for the eggs.”

I was not very polite. “I won’t be doing anything for you next year.” She looked… pissed off and angry. But then again this is a woman I’ve known since I was 19. We’ve never gotten along. If I had understood in the very beginning that it was that (insert name) I probably wouldn’t have donated eggs in the first place. It made the hunt somewhat unfortunate. Dramatically unfortunate. The person in charge wanted to just go around and have adults collect them to throw away.

I told the kids to run. They listened to me. Luckily we had some big kids so probably at least 100 were picked up.

Next year buy toys?! And you would expect them to be themed. Which means you think I should spend $500+ on toys for people I don’t know. Bitch you are dreaming.

Quite frankly, if I’m going to spend $500 on toys for kids I don’t know… I’m not giving them to the kids who are privileged enough to have parents who bring them to a My Little Pony convention. Yeah right.

(It’s not that I’m against donating $500 to worthy causes. A bunch of spoiled kids aren’t a worthy cause.)

Yes, I’m judgmental as fuck. I can live with that.

I’m partially pissed because I buy candy that *I* will eat. Which means there’s no HFCS, it’s organic sugar. Those assholes threw away a lot of money today.

IT’S ONE MORE THING.

It’s not a “big deal”. But I won’t be going back to that convention next year. I don’t think it is the fault of the convention but I didn’t have much fun. There was a lot going on.

I’m so glad we don’t have much scheduled coming up. The “group” camping trip will probably end up being us and three friends of mine. We will have fun. I am crossing my fingers that two families can go, but I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe that needs to be how I treat “friends” from this point forward. I’ll cross my fingers but I won’t hold my breath. I will allow myself to hope (because gosh I enjoy your company) but I won’t hurt myself with hoping.

I need to be prepared to have fun anyway. I need to make this trip work.

I can’t make everything work. There are relationships I can’t salvage because our basic needs and orientations are too different. There are people I can’t spend much time with because we are both aggressive and overly sensitive at the same time. There are people who just can’t handle being around how angry I am.

Even if I am currently feeling some anger at you, I’m aware that the anger I feel towards you is a speck of sand on the beach of my rage. You aren’t really what I’m angry because of. Ok, I didn’t like that thing that time… but that thing isn’t really why I’m angry.

I’m angry for existential reasons. I’m angry because my mom told me to find a way to just get along with my brother. My mom told me not to disrupt group harmony by getting hysterical over him beating me up and trying to rape me. Just don’t be a problem, Krissy.

I’m not angry because of you. But right now you are standing near me and I am very very angry.

I want to hurt myself really badly. I want an end of these angry voices in my head. I want to beat my head until the throb is so loud I can’t hear them any more.

Krissy is the problem. It has ever been thus. My friend said today that she knows the one way to stop this pain. She’s right. There is only one way.

Today this wave isn’t enough to crest over me. Today is not the day. This isn’t that much pain. I can handle this.

And, I’ll say it: I’m a lucky person. Noah really makes up for a lot of life problems. He is so incredibly kind to me. When I can’t say nothing nice… I’m still grateful for Noah.

Noah tells me it is ok to get mad. Noah talks about the psychological underpinnings of why people must have group loyalty and why that is such a problem for freaks like us. We are the people who have been historically shunned and stoned. (And not in that fun way.) Disruptors.

We are the problem from the point of view of the group. Complaining is the problem. Getting kicked in the throat is fine. Having difficulty breathing is fine. Having trouble swallowing food for days is fine. Complaining is not ok.

This is part of why I don’t do well in social groups. I go home and write about this shit. I’m an asshole.

I want to matter. But I don’t. And it makes me hard. And that makes it even harder for me to matter to people. And it’s all my fault. Because I was the problem. If I could have found a way to not be a problem then things could have been fine. I was serving the forces of group unity.

Now I’m not. I’m trying to act like I, as an individual, am important and that’s stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

My mom couldn’t treat me like an individual. My needs weren’t seen. My needs weren’t important.

The part of me that “should” learn how to deal with people in this situation is stuck. It still thinks that people who react in this manner have the power of life and love and death over me. It isn’t true any more. But my brain is stuck. My brain doesn’t know what it should know. My brain just knows… again.

I’m really happy that I’m going to stay home for a while and meet my own needs. I sure like my home. I like the people in it. Even though the kids… well… we had an adventure together. They have to test boundaries. Some days I handle it better than other days. I was cranky anyway. It sucks for them when I don’t have extra spoons. My belly hurt all weekend and that makes it harder to be patient.

When a kid refuses to use the toilet when you are in the bathroom and says, “No I must go back to the table” and then you go back to the table to drop the kid off and “I have to go pee” and… all weekend was like that. It’s not big stuff. It’s really trivial shit. But I had no spoons for it.

And the kids said their favorite part of the conference was buying the toys with their allowance. I said next time we are going to Target and saving me the cost of the conference.

The bronies were nice people. Folks at the convention went really far out of their way to be nice to random kids. I was highly impressed by the enthusiasm and affection all the cosplayers displayed. They truly love what they are doing and are happy to gab about it for hours. Given how much time Shanna spends talking about sewing stuff… it was a dream come true.

She’s almost 7. Joanne’s down the road won’t teach sewing till a kid hits 8. Good thing we get to blow half a year on a road trip while waiting to grow up. We have hand-sewing projects to keep us busy until then.

I have this problem. Where people want to be my friend-out-at-arms-length and I want them to be my bosom-companion and then I have expectations I shouldn’t have and then… I get upset when they aren’t met.

I create this situation. I just don’t know what to do about it. Transference, projection, abreaction, worth, self-esteem… oh my.

And through it all loops this chain of whispering voices, “Not worth the resources. Just die already. Just die already. Why the fuck aren’t you dead yet you fucking cunt?”

I would like to order a new brain, please. Can I have one delivered in Two Days with Prime?

Come down like a box of hammers.

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I was thinking about the idea of “safe space”. I hang out in the lobbies of a lot of communities that are very focused on this idea. Places where people are safe. It means very different things to different people. I was thinking about what it would mean to me.

I believe that children need to hit. I believe it is part of the developmental process and …yeah it happens. I believe that the appropriate response is coming down like a box of hammers. On any given day my children get one chance for hitting someone. If they hit a second time we are going home right the fuck now and we will be having an unpleasant conversation the whole way home about how you do not have the right to hit people.

I believe that a safe space for me would involve people caring more when their children hit other people.

I don’t live in a world where that is true. Well, there are always people who over react. I don’t scream hysterically at my children for hitting. I don’t hit them. I don’t ground them for extensive periods of time. I don’t take away a bunch of privileges. I sure as hell don’t punish them once we get home–by then they bloody well forgot anyway.

I react in the moment. You get one chance per day. Not three fucking chances on hitting people. I don’t think so. Unless someone else hit you first, and then ok fine you can hit.

But quite frankly… my kids rarely hit back with anyone other than one another. They like fantasy violence quite a bit. They definitely egg on “fighting”. But they are very aware that if they hit a non-combatant mom is going to explode like a fire cracker. No. No. No.

You do not hit someone unless you have their consent. Did you ask them if they want to play a fighting game with words? No? Then what in the world makes you think it is ok to hit them?! IT IS NOT OK TO HIT SOMEONE WHO HAS NOT CONSENTED TO BEING HIT.

Lots of people will agree to play fighting games if you ask. It’s fine to ask.

But I don’t feel like other people have the consent fetish that I have. I need things negotiated and spelled out. Other people… not so much.

I’ve got to say, when my kids were habitually hitting the punishment did continue to the house. When it was happening almost every time we went somewhere we had groundings at home over it. It is a normal developmental stage.

The important part is how adults handle it. If adults act like it is fine… well. That’s a fucking lesson. If adults teach that you are allowed to hit as long as you don’t get caught… that’s a fucking lesson.

My kids don’t enjoy my blistering lectures. Do they “get” all of them? No. They don’t. I talk as if they were adults and they aren’t. They “get” a fraction of what I’m saying. But these conversations are cumulative. They will remember that from as far back as their memory goes their mother was absolutely consistent you do not hit someone who has not consented to being hit.

I understand that other people don’t think this is a message that should be consciously taught. Maybe they just never think of it as an option as opposed to making a decision. I don’t really know.

But it won’t work any other way in my house. I’ll drag you home from the park yelling at you about how you have no right to strike someone else. I won’t feel bad. I DON’T GET TO HIT YOU. YOU DON’T GET TO TURN AROUND AND HIT OTHER PEOPLE. WE DON’T PLAY THAT SHIT AROUND HERE.

Play fighting is different. That’s a game. Know how you know something is a game? You asked someone if they wanted to play before you got started.

But Shanna seriously has issues about getting in other peoples personal space bubbles. I suspect that is part of what causes kids to feel motivated to hit her. She gets right the fuck in their face and most people aren’t taught what to say. Maybe she’ll learn. I’m not sure how many more times she will need to be hit though. I couldn’t begin to count how many times she’s been punched. We talk about it a lot.

So much for home schooling meaning that my kids won’t be beat on. At least I’m there and I get to take them fucking home after the third hit of the day.

If my kids get one chance, why do I give other people two chances? Because one kid hit both my kids once and the other time… man those two have a long running sorta-feud. Given how many times Shanna has punched him… well. What did she do this time? And he does apologize. Usually even without prompting from an adult.

So how many chances do I give? I don’t know. I’m very tired of being hit. Very very very very very very very very very tired of being hit. And I am even more sick of my kids getting hit. And I notice that they are usually the ones who come crying because they got hit.

I’m not sure if they are bigger whiners or if they are actually hit that much more often than other kids.

I’d like to go a whole fucking year without being hit nonconsensually. I’ve never had a year like that. Not one.

I feel very triggered. I wasn’t “pushed out” of my biological family because I prosecuted my father. But I was told through actions that in order to be allowed to stay I would have to accept that everyone around me would rewrite history. “It didn’t really happen.” “He never did anything like that to anyone else.” “You are the problem. We were fine until you caused problems.”

I’m the problem. I should apologize. I should promise to not be a problem any more.

The only way I can promise that is if I die. I’ve never been anything but the problem.

Cue round of intense suicidal ideation. THIS IS A SHITTY TIME. I HAVE AWESOME KIDS IN THE HOUSE WHO ARE BEING NICE TO ME AND LOVING ON ME. WHY IN THE FUCK AM I IN THE YARD CRYING BECAUSE I FEEL UNLOVED AND WORTHLESS AND LIKE I SHOULD DIE.

Because I can’t not cry if I’m in the room with them right now. And Noah is here. It is being handled.

I’m not going to die over this. These people are so not worth it. If losing my mother isn’t going to do it… hell no. But turning the movie screen surround sound system off is hard. I have a lot of willpower to abstain from following through; stopping the thoughts is harder. I feel like I have run most of my life on sheer hate. I’m not dead yet because you will not win, motherfucker.

Which motherfucker, precisely? I don’t even know any more. Take your fucking pick. I’ve got a whole fucking card deck full of names.

Do something different. Yes, the crying and typing is an improvement over the cutting and the head banging, fine and dandy. (Though the arm pain means that this is maybe actually one of the most self-harming actions of my whole life. Cutting had far less chance of crippling me. Ok, banging my head could have caused a stroke. WHATEVER.)

I should fucking know by now. If you have a problem with people you have to shut the fuck up. People are not actually interested in “working through differences”. They want confirmation bias that they are right and you are wrong. I should never have bothered to talk to that fucking mother in the first place. I knew she wouldn’t give a shit about her kid hurting me. Why in the fuck was I so fucking stupid?

I am the problem. Clearly.

If I didn’t have a house full of kids, whoa. I’d make different life choices.

But if I didn’t have the kids I wouldn’t be dealing with these people anyway. So maybe it’s a wash.

Why don’t I just walk away? Why is this worth bothering to try for anyway? Mostly because I’ve kept my kids here for four years and I’ve told them to bond with people. Now I feel like a monster.

Everyone I tell them to bond with I eventually run off. I am a piece of shit. I suppose it will be a good thing that I have bonus kids here tonight. I will have something to do while I’m awake anyway. They always need a lot of help at night. They haven’t done that much sleeping outside their house. Lots of checking in, “Yes, you are still with Krissy and Noah and Shanna and Calli. Yes, you will see your parents again soon. Yes, we love you. Yes, they love you. It is time to sleep now so we can play tomorrow.” I can fucking smile on cue to be reassuring. I’ve worked hard.

I believe that children deserve to have an adult who wants to meet their emotional needs around. It doesn’t have to be a parent full time. It is healthier if it isn’t. Children need to learn that having needs is ok. Needing reassurance is ok. Needing to have help feeling safe is ok.

I can feel safe here. If I can’t feel safe other places, well… if I weren’t such a fucking problem maybe I wouldn’t have so many problems.

I’ve never been able to find a way to not be a problem other than staying home. Or dying.

I want to run away so bad. I’ve lived here too long. I’ve used up my welcome. People are tired of my bullshit. I don’t blame them. I’m tired of it too. If I could run away from being inside my head I would. I want to turn the movie screens off and I can’t.

I keep coming back to swimming out into the ocean. That really does seem to be my first choice. If I go far enough it is pretty fucking sure. I didn’t do so well with over dosing. My body is so sensitive to medications these days I don’t think my body would permit an overdose. I couldn’t use a gun. I converted my garage so I can’t follow my dad. I’m really not a big enough asshole to use Tommy’s method. That was seriously traumatizing to the people involved in the rescue. That’s not fair you fucking asshole. If you are going to kill yourself, at least don’t make a bunch of fucking spectators watch you burn. Not cool. People don’t get over that. Hell, I didn’t even see it and I can’t get over it.

Swimming. Yes, swimming straight out into the Pacific Ocean sounds great.

I have kids! Can’t! Calli tells me all the god damn time that I have to die of very old age. I’ll try, baby.

I’m definitely having temporary problems right now. In ten years this won’t matter at all. Stop being so melodramatic. Err, I’m diagnosed with reasons why I react this way. Fuck you, negative-self-talk. I am fucking improving. I god damn held it together great today. I didn’t start crying till bedtime. That’s doing just fucking fine, ok?!

Whether something is good or bad depends on your point of view.

So sad.

Good & Bad

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For the past few days I’ve been thinking about something. Most things are neither good nor bad as part of their intrinsic “existence”. They are good or bad in the eyes of someone who is judging.

For example: my kids can’t sit still to save their fucking lives (literally) so they can’t move up to a booster seat from a car seat even though they are WAY big enough compared to the legal minimum. I could be really annoyed with them for being so immature. I could be frustrated that they won’t “grow up”. Or I could recognize that I live full time with ants in my pants and I can be glad that they are in an environment where they aren’t punished for the nature they have. I just keep them in car seats. (This goes through my head because I have to install four carseats in the van again. Sigh. I loathe installing carseats. I always break half my nails and have numb fingers for days. CAN’T WE MOVE INTO FUCKING BOOSTERS ALREADY?!?!?!!!!!!)

I sent a reference to a study to a friend. She was afraid I was trying to say something mean. It was a study that finds that how much time parents spend with their kids has little effect on outcome for life. Being a working parent is no worse than being a stay at home parent according to this study–specifically they found that socio-economic level is most of what decides how your kids will turn out. (Shocking, I know.) I sent this to a friend who works in a “See! You were right all along!” sort of way. She didn’t read it that way. I’m sorry it seemed hurtful. I meant it more like, “I’m totally wasting time obsessing over my kids. I should get a job.”

I more meant to poke fun at myself. But things are neither good nor bad in a vacuum. They are good or bad depending on how they are received.

I pick sensitive people to be friends with. That means there are times when we all feel thin skinned. I keep praying that I will get better at riding through these times.

Shanna asked me if she was stupid for loving the boy she’s had a crush on for years. I told her that if loving him brings both of them joy and happiness… it isn’t stupid even if you don’t love him forever. It is never stupid to enjoy the time you have with someone. Even if it isn’t forever.

I need to work on my perspective around the home school group. I fear that we are nearing our exit date. This feels so sad. I’m not going to be an asshole about doing anything dramatic before the trip. I just don’t know that I will try hard to rejoin the group when we come back. I really don’t know.

On one hand I’m having a hard time with this because I feel like a quitter and a bad person. My kids NEED FRIENDS. But… my kids have friends with or without this group. And really… they didn’t bond that much with anyone. Near as I can tell most of the group doesn’t like us very much. It is hard that we have put in the time to get established in the group. It’s been four years. If we have more problems than good times… why bother?

This is still going to be the school group I’ve been associated with the longest for my life. Maybe I’ve hit the limit of what I can handle. If my kids were going to preschool then regular school we wouldn’t get upset about graduating from one group of people to another. Why do I feel like such a quitter with this crowd?

I’m tired of driving 40+ minutes to sit at a freezing cold park. I’m the one with the problem so I’ll solve it by backing away.

Apparently I’m the one with most of the problems. I should promise to not be a problem any more.

Maybe I should just stay home.

Maybe I’m just the problem.

The group doesn’t care about having institutional memory as to which kids have done what. I need to not care either. I have no power, influence, or status. Shut the fuck up you stupid bitch.

I …

I feel sad.

So I’ll say that today I took the trailer to the CHP station to get the VIN verified. On Friday I get to visit the DMV for registration and licensing and what-not. I’m excited. I get to run away from home soon. So I can forget that I’m not very wanted.

Tonight my bonus kids will come to visit. They stay till Friday. I’ll drop them off on our way to PonyCon (Officially named BabsCon but who knows what the hell that means). I’m so excited about seeing them. I haven’t been feeling very successful with kids lately other than them. I feel like I’m doing everything wrong because I’m bad. Because I deserve to be kicked. Because I am bad. Because I’m angry that I was told to promise not to be a problem any more. I don’t know how to stop feeling angry about this.

I’ll stop eventually. I’m just not there yet.

Next week a different set of kids is spending the night. We have never kept this pair before. I have more apprehension than with my bonus kids just because I’ve never been alone with these kids for long. They have very different rules in their family. (Not evaluating them as better or worse.) It’s going to be an exercise in “setting expectations”. I love those. I do better with kids than I do with adults.

With kids I’m good at saying, “Oh! I didn’t explain this right. That was my mistake. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how to be successful.” With adults I’m all, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you fuck up?” Which is… not so helpful. I’m such an asshole.

I feel very good at handing patience to people I perceive as younger than me and horrifyingly bad at doing it with people who are older. One trick to force me out of this pattern is to have someone older than me as my designated student. (I have taught writing classes to adults much older than me.) Then I know going in that I have the “power” in the exchange and I can be gracious.

Such an asshole.

We got our summer sandals yesterday so we can work on breaking them in before the trip.

The thing about not feeling wanted… I spend a fair bit of time feeling like Noah doesn’t want me around. If ever there was an irrational, unfounded feeling… this is it.

The problem lies in my ability to perceive. Part of the trouble is people are so spread out that everyone needs a lot of driving from me in order to facilitate relationships. That hurdle means I need to feel pulled like a magnet. If I don’t feel wanted like that… it gets harder and harder.

I called my friend on the phone every day for over a year. We had a hard communication issue. We are still friends. I love her so much. I don’t really call any more. I can’t. I’m not punishing her. I just… can’t. I start crying as soon as I pick up the phone because I don’t feel invited enough so I put it down without dialing. Which isn’t her fault and I don’t want her to do anything to try and change this. It just is. Instead we are emailing a bit more often and trying to arrange in person time. I can feel wanted enough for that. Once I get there her facial expression lets me know that she really wants me there. But a hurdle got put in front of the phone. And I don’t know how to get over it.

I do this with people and methods of communication. This is a constellation of problems I have over and over with a wide variety of people. This isn’t someone else’s fault. It just is.

Living with it is hard. Is my over sensitivity a good thing or a bad thing? It just is. Being this sensitive is part of what makes me me. It’s part of what makes me good at being empathetic in the ways I am. I wouldn’t give up that part of me for anything. It just means that I am hypersensitive to feeling like my presence is not making peoples lives better.

I want to make peoples lives better. I’m terribly afraid that mostly I make the world a worse place. I drain people of energy and resources and I’m really not worth it. I’m a needy motherfucker.

Someone I know was talking about how she has “no friends” but I know of her knowing a lot of people. Near as I can tell she meant, “I don’t have anyone I can call on a bad day for support”. Uhm, do you know what I do on my bad days? I talk to the internet. I don’t get a response the vast majority of the time. I don’t call anyone. I don’t have anyone in my life right now that I feel that comfortable with. I’ve had it at points for periods of time, but it comes and goes.

Mostly on bad days I isolate myself and cry and try to wait for it to end; I hope it ends fast.

Does that mean I have “no friends”? Well that seems mean to all of the people who give what they can.

My bad days are just too much. They are too bad. They are too frequent. It isn’t fair to burden people. My shrink tells me over and over that I just can’t expect to ever have that kind of support. Period.

So I stay home. And I cry. And I write. That’s how I get through bad days now.

Well, at least it is better than cutting myself as a reminder that everyone would be happier if I was dead. If I stopped being such a problem.

My feelings are all over the map. High and low at the same time. This is overwhelming and shitty.

Just run away. Just run away. Just run away.